Steadfast

by Michelle Hauck

  She groaned, refusing to open her eyes. No matter how well she managed them, the dread returned to haunt her twice a week like clockwork. And experience had shown that the anxiety would turn to outright fear if she didn’t get up and moving quickly. Lingering in bed only made it worse. Perhaps if she hurried, she could claim illness and get Lope to take her class.

  A tentative opening of her eyes sent pain shooting through her head and down her spine as bright light stabbed into her eyes. Had she overslept? It should still be dark. She had to hurry. She was late.

  Her mattress felt thin; something hard lay directly underneath it. This couldn’t be her bed.

  “Calm,” someone said right in her ear. “You don’t have class, cousin.”

  “Class?” She rubbed at her aching head. “Ramiro?”

  “Yes. Each time you wake, you rant about getting to class.”

  Wait. Each time?

  Her eyes reopened, squinting against light reflected off a mirror. She squinted more and discovered the reflection came not from a mirror but a breastplate leaning against the wall. A breastplate that shone like a sun, when every such piece of equipment she was familiar with had been a dull iron-gray color.

  She shifted, and pain sliced through her arm. The limb was bound against her body in a sling. She also noted that the hardness beneath her thin mattress was bedrock. “Stone. Where am I?”

  “Still in the tomb. It’s been three days since the pillar fell on you.” A damp cloth was set on her forehead, soothing.

  Of course. Just a dream. A memory. She hadn’t been a junior professor in a dozen years or been responsible for a class of first years in nearly as long. Not since she had first graduated.

  Funny how such fears stayed with you. But she was here with Ramiro and Father Telo, trying to find a way to stop Dal. What had happened?

  “My head. My arm. It hurts.” A tear leaked from the corner of her eye.

  “That’s where the pillar hit you. Drink this. I got it from that herb shop Father Telo visited.”

  The bitter liquid in the cup thrust against her lips made her retch. She drank it all anyway. The agony began to lift slightly. A strong arm helped when she struggled upright. “Father Telo?”

  “Not doing as well as you, I’m afraid. I can’t tell you how glad I am that you’re awake.”

  Sitting up, her eyes couldn’t take in much around her, zeroing in on small details with tunnel vision from the pain. Teresa could see the fire had been allowed to die down to nearly embers, the coal merely glowing lumps. The room was dark except where the light reflected off pieces of armor lined against the wall. The metal shone like silver mirrors. Other sections of armor lay in a pile, covered in rust and the dark tarnish of age.

  “What’s . . .” The pounding of her head wouldn’t let her finish. She pointed instead.

  “The armor? It was inside the pillar. I tried cleaning it up for something to do and that was underneath. I’ve never seen anything like it.” Awe rang in Ramiro’s voice, but she couldn’t bring herself to care. “When I sold my other armor, I never expected to find this.”

  Teresa leaned on his arm until slowly the pain faded from a raging river to a fast stream, and gave promise of dying to a dull ache. A glance at the pile of their possessions showed it to be much smaller. “Sold your armor? Why would you do that?”

  “It took all my coin to pay for the healers and the medicine. There was nothing left to pay a messenger. Selling the armor, one of my knives, and a few other small things brought in enough for that and to buy food and more coal.”

  “But your armor . . .” How such a decision must have stung.

  “Wasn’t really mine anyway. That got left in the swamp. It was only borrowed. And I had all this time on my hands while you healed. I started working on the old relic armor from the pillar. I thought it was junk—too light. But it’s strong. Stronger than anything I’ve seen. I can use it to buy the other armor back once this is all cleaned. The stone from the pillar didn’t even dent it when it fell.”

  Teresa groaned at the reminder. “Unlike me. Odd how the universe sometimes has a way of evening things out. One armor for another.” She touched her head gingerly. “Three days, you say.”

  “Aye. The healer bound up your wounds, and I fetched the medicine and more water. Got the message sent to my parents at Suseph. Then there was nothing to do but wait and try to clean that armor. It must have been inside the pillar for centuries.”

  “You’ve been busy. Three days,” she repeated like a parrot. “I’ve been out for three days.”

  “The healer had me wake all of you every few hours because of the head wounds, but you’ve been out except for that.”

  “Father Telo?” she asked, surprised at the plaintive whine in her voice.

  “Here.” The arm around her back disappeared. His hands directed hers to a blanket-wrapped bundle. She touched the priest’s shoulder and up his neck to find his cheek. Heat engulfed her hand. Beads of sweat coated Father Telo’s dark skin, shining like dewdrops in the faint light.

  “Fever.”

  “Aye,” Ramiro confirmed. “I get the medicine into him, but it hasn’t done much good. Just kept him from getting hotter. The healer said it will break tonight or not at all. But yours did, so that’s a good sign.”

  Father Telo had been her companion for so many days. They had gone through so much together. She hated to see him suffer like this, seeing how he’d suffered so much already. He was strong, but his body had been through the wringer. A cold streak of fear pierced through her own pain. What if he didn’t make it?

  Teresa willed healing into her touch. Julian had gotten a miracle. Why not Father Telo? Santiago. God, please. Heal him. Her heart begged the words silently, but the priest’s skin remained hot to the touch. No miracle followed her plea.

  Sadly, she tugged his blanket up higher.

  “You brought a healer here?” she asked and then felt stupid. Ramiro had already told her that. Her mind felt slow and clumsy. The rest of her helpless, nothing but a burden on Ramiro. Unable to help at all. She felt at her face, but detected no heat from fever. Nor could she recall such an illness.

  “Had to. To start with, your arm is broken. The Northerner’s legs. Father Telo had a dislocated shoulder.”

  “Santabe?” she asked.

  “Alive,” came a new voice. A harsh voice. “No thanks to you.”

  “You dropped the pillar on us,” Ramiro said. “This is your own fault. By rights, you should be the one lying there with a fever.”

  “I demand to be released! At least move me to the other side of the room.”

  “Get up and go there. Nobody is stopping you.”

  Teresa pulled herself all the way upright and took a clear look around the chamber. The same sarcophagi lined the perimeter. The fire still burned at the center of the space. The remainder of their belongings had been piled neatly at hand, some glass bottles lined up in a row—the medicines. Polishing cloths and various wire brushes that Ramiro must have been using were spread around. The red and white Diviners lay side by side near where Ramiro must have been working. Farther away, a mound of rock lay heaped in a random sprawl on the far side of the embers. Carving covered parts of its surface. The ceiling above it sagged noticeably.

  The fallen pillar. Dimly Teresa could remember darting forward to try to drag Father Telo out of the way. She must have failed.

  Santabe sat among the fallen stone, while she and Telo had been pulled away and taken to the opposite side of the room.

  She frowned as understanding came. Without the pillar, that part of the tomb had no support. The ceiling over there could come tumbling down at any moment, and Ramiro had left Santabe in the fault zone.

  “Move her.”

  “What?” Ramiro said.

  “Are you unhurt, cousin?” Teresa asked.

  “Stiff,” he said. “A bruise on my chest where she kicked me, but I’m unhurt.”

  “Then move her out of danger. It’s
what the priest would want.”

  “The healer told me not to if she ever wanted to walk again. As I told her many times.” Ramiro raised his voice at the last part, and Santabe glared and looked away. “Actually the healer said her legs need to be amputated. He didn’t think they’ll heal, but said not moving could help.”

  “But the ceiling.”

  “Is not likely to change. Look close.” Ramiro pointed to one of the intact pillars in the room. “They barely touch the ceiling. That’s how it fell so easily. If it was securely attached and load bearing, it wouldn’t have fallen with just her weight behind it. They wouldn’t be hollow. They’re just decorative. The ceiling must have been sagging before Santabe kicked it over. It could have been sagging for centuries. This place is old. So old I can’t even read the writing on the pillar. It’s more like pictures than letters.”

  He got up and went to their bags, picking up the red Diviner. “I think this is what she’s actually worried about. I’ve been thinking about it. About how much protection they offer to keep off Dal. How far that stretches. She seems entirely too concerned with being close to us all of a sudden. Almost like she thinks we’re going to need its protection soon.”

  Teresa turned from the intact pillar—which did have a small gap between top and ceiling, just wide enough to allow light through—to examine Santabe. The tall Northerner looked decidedly uncomfortable. She would have seen it herself if her head didn’t hurt quite so much. “Smartly figured, cousin. I noticed the hieroglyphics also. I think these tombs may have been here long before Aveston came into existence.

  “The pillars could be part of the tombs instead of built into the room. A repository for some treasure of the dead, like the armor. Concealed so no one would steal them.”

  “And if I could figure it out, so could she,” Ramiro said. Santabe bared her teeth at them in a snarl. “Which means she wants the pleasure of our company, not because of the ceiling tumbling down, but because of this.” He hefted the Diviner. “I’m guessing you need to be pretty close to it for it to keep Dal off. What do you think?”

  “I think you’re right, cousin.” Teresa fingered her sling. Through the cloth, she could feel her arm and something long and straight on either side. Splints. Shaped shafts of wood bound on her arm to keep the bones aligned.

  Something nagged at her and it wasn’t a problem with the splint. She tried to brush the pain aside and clear her head. Something . . . something about what Ramiro had told her . . . not today but at another time. Something there that she couldn’t grasp, unlike the wood of her splint. “The Northern priests wear the Diviners strapped at their waist,” she said, thinking aloud. “The red and the white. They keep them close. What if they don’t work much beyond the sphere of a person or maybe a small room?” She looked around at the chamber of tombs, big enough to hold a country dance inside. “That means it wouldn’t protected the whole of this vault. The Northerners wouldn’t leave any lying around if they need to keep them that close . . .”

  “We already talked about that,” Ramiro reminder her. “Remember? We decided there was no point in going looking in Her Beauty for more red Diviners. Not unless we wanted to take out their priests, too.”

  She waved him off. “I remember that. Just . . . There’s something else. Something you said. I can almost—” She gasped. “If the red Diviners can keep Dal from killing—keep him away—but they don’t have much span, much distance. Then the Northerners would want as many as they could get.”

  “Yeah. Obviously. I saw how they tried to make more of them outside of Aveston—where my military brothers died . . .”

  The last piece clicked home. She scrambled to her feet, ignoring a moment of wooziness, and took the Diviner from Ramiro. It felt cool to the touch but inert, lifeless. Just a thing. She expected it to be humming with life because of the magic inside. “You said the priests take the white ones and turn them red. That they had hundreds of the white ones. That they tried to turn them to red and failed. They use the blood of the people Dal murders.”

  “Yes . . .”

  “Don’t you see? They aren’t protecting the citizens of Aveston. Couldn’t if they wanted to. There aren’t enough of these Diviners. What if it goes beyond not protecting the civilians? What if they intend to sacrifice Aveston to make more Diviners? To get more of their white weapons to turn red?”

  “Nobody is that evil.” Ramiro looked at Santabe. “Or maybe they are.”

  Teresa bent although it ratcheted up the pain in her head and dropped the Diviner as if it had grown white hot, scrubbing her hand on her trousers. She didn’t want to finish her thoughts, but the words came tumbling out anyway. “By the saints. That would explain why they let some people leave and don’t try to stop them. As long as enough people stay in Aveston to provide plenty of blood, why would they care who goes? The Northerners will cause another massacre to make more Diviners. They’ll kill our people so theirs can live.”

  Her knees felt wobbly, and she went back to collapse beside Father Telo, taking in the reassuring bulk of his body against hers. “All they need is blood to start it, right, cousin? They intend to kill the civilians and let their blood bring Dal, just to make more Diviners. We have to stop them.”

  Chapter 28

  Julian let the parchment slide through his fingers, catching the paper by the top folded edge and flipping it to repeat the process. His fingers, and perhaps his heart, couldn’t seem to let the letter from Ramiro go—even during the most important meeting he’d ever attended. By rights he shouldn’t be inside the tent with a seat at the table, but Beatriz had insisted on his presence as one of her three advisors, along with Captain Gonzalo and the Bishop of Colina Hermosa, so he got to hear what unfolded.

  Though he was not sure what Beatriz hoped to accomplish with this meeting, he did admire her insistence on trying. This get-together would spread the warning—whether anyone heeded it or not.

  But alcaldes tended to come to such meetings, with blinders already in place, to see only what they wanted. Already, as usual with a summit of ciudades-estado, no one could agree on anything, with the possible exception of the existence of the Northerners—though Julian gave them the benefit of the doubt on that. If put to the test, he’d bet Alcalde Juan of Crueses would flatly deny the army under oath, even if it were at his gates. Reaching any kind of agreement would be nigh on impossible in the best of conditions . . . and the conditions were hardly optimal.

  Everyone had seen the overcrowding in Suseph, made even worse by the influx of evacuees from Aveston. All the refugees had gladly helped till and plant new fields for extra food, but with no rains, it looked likely that all the crops would fail. Each family had accepted three to six more mouths under their roof and that created stress as well.

  Such realities would influence this meeting, making the politicians particularly cagey. Overcrowding was a subject all attending wanted to avoid, as no one wanted to be asked to take in more people in these times. Yet they knew denying their help outright would make them look reprehensible.

  No, the overcrowding would not come up for discussion, and that was just one subject they wanted to avoid—one of many. They had already branched out to a safer topic, and they would try to steer the rest of this conversation to items that didn’t truly matter to make sure they didn’t come out on the losing end of this convocation.

  “Leviathan is dead,” the Bishop of Crueses said stoutly in reply to Beatriz’s recap of the letter from Aveston. “Our Lord destroyed the Darkness at the time of creation.”

  “Then what of dragons, griffins, and other such monsters?” the newly created bishop of Aveston demanded. Both the alcalde and bishop of that city had been executed by the Northerners, forcing a hasty election among the evacuees from Aveston to decide new leaders.

  “Creatures of the flesh,” Crueses insisted, “but mortal. Not part of the Darkness. The Darkness was banished.”

  The new bishop of Aveston was a large man with a large voice and qui
ckly drowned out his counterpart from Crueses, proving even men of God had their flash points. “Poppycock. Scripture is clear. The Leviathan was sliced into scions to torment humanity. The Lord sent the saints to rid us of them.” More than half the clerics in attendance shouted their support, while the other half shook their heads before shouting back. The tent threatened to erupt into chaos. Clean-shaven men of peace stood from their seats, some with fists raised.

  “They are extinct. Destroyed by the saints,” one shouted.

  “Dreamers are naught but rumors. Heresy.”

  “Santa Margarita, who was swallowed by the dragon, was a dreamer—”

  “—no proof.”

  “—faith—”

  “The scripture of Menendo—”

  “—inaccurate translation.”

  Julian halted the slide of the letter through his fingers, catching it by the middle and looking at Beatriz with concern. Less than ten minutes for a meeting to lose control. He knew clerics could get heated over details, but he had rarely witnessed such a vehement scene. Each of the eight alcaldes who had come in person took the side of their spiritual advisor as would the other five designee representatives of alcaldes, though they wouldn’t be as vocal about their support. The ciudades-estado had always fought each other starting from the time when they had been wandering tribes, but he’d hoped they’d learned a little more civility over the ages.

  He wasn’t sure where that optimism came from.

  The entire convocation could devolve if Beatriz didn’t get control quickly. She had to see through their steering of the topics to useless areas. Yet he could not say as much outright where all could hear.

  He cleared his throat with force.

  As if she sensed his cue, Beatriz pounded on the table with the gavel. As the convener of the convocation, she officially led the proceedings. Elderly bishops with white hair and arthritic knees sank back to their seats, looking chagrined, like schoolboys caught pulling a girl’s plait.