A Prelude to Penemue
By Sara M. Harvey
Sara M. Harvey made her fiction debut in 2006 with the romantic urban fantasy A Year and a Day. In 2008, she turns her attention to horror with The Convent of the Pure, the first in a novella trilogy set in a Steampunk universe. Sara is also a costumer and works as an assistant costume designer, an instructor in costume and fashion design, as well as a contributor to costume history textbooks. She lives in Nashville, TN with her husband and fellow author, Matt, and their dogs, Guinevere and Eowyn.
This short story is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in these stories are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.
This short story is a prequel to THE CONVENT OF THE PURE.
A PRELUDE TO PENEMUE
Copyright © 2009 by Sara M. Harvey
Cover Art “A Prelude to Penemue” by Melissa Gay
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce the book, or portions thereof, in any form.
Published by Apex Publications, LLC
PO Box 24323
Lexington, KY 40524
www.apexbookcompany.com
www.saramharvey.com
www.melissagay.com
First Edition: June 2009
Their height in heaven comforts not,
Their glory nought to me;
’T was best imperfect, as it was;
I’m finite, I can’t see.
The house of supposition,
The glimmering frontier
That skirts the acres of perhaps,
To me shows insecure.
The wealth I had contented me;
If ’t was a meaner size,
Then I had counted it until
It pleased my narrow eyes
Better than larger values,
However true their show;
This timid life of evidence
Keeps pleading, “I don’t know.”
“Their Height in Heaven Comforts Not,”
Emily Dickinson
The air reeked of burnt flesh and sulphur. A cluster of Grigori crouched beside the manor’s stone wall, taking a moment to breathe. The stones were still warm, and Mrs. Hester Sloane, Lady Regalii, could still smell sweet wine and roast boar from the dinner party so rudely disrupted. She pulled the gilt hairpins from her summer blonde hair and quickly braided it to keep it out of way.
“My love—” her husband’s shadow fell across her shoulder.
“Marius, now is not the time. I have a duty. Please, stay with the others.”
“The other humans.”
Hester turned, rising to her feet. “Yes. The other humans. This is no place for you, husband dear. I fear for your safety and that of our sweet Charlotte. Find her and Mary in the nursery and get home. You will be safer there than here.” A shudder passed through the ground. “Go, while you are still able.”
“Hester, you are not a fighter. Come with me!”
“All of us are fighters, whether we are born to be warriors or not. I have a duty, my heart. Please understand. We of the Order of the Grigori are bound to protect the humans in our charge, even the Regalii. Just please, take our daughter and our servants home, I will follow when I can.” She kissed him softly on the lips and turned away, savoring the familiar brush of his moustache against her flesh.
“I love you,” he called.
Hester caught up with her fellows as they pressed back into the battle. Cadmus Gyony, a tall and imposing figure, led the formation. He was one of the few warriors who had been asked to the noble banquet. Regalii, Vedma, and Aldias, the sects powerful in the political structure of the Order, were not bred for the battlefield, and it made them an easy target.
“Spellcasters,” Cadmus bellowed, “fall back. Be prepared on my mark. Healers, behind the casters—you will have a dedicated guard. Anna, protect the healers.”
Anna wore a servant’s livery but was quickly yanking off her lacy cap and assembling a staff from several lengths of tempered wood bound in brass fittings she had pulled from the pockets of her long coat. “Aye, sir.” She took her position among them, Hester and the two Vedma.
There were but four other Gyony taking up places at the fore, facing down the creature that hunched in the darkness. The broken bodies of stablehands and horses lay among the shattered carriages. An Insinori youth dashed out and laid down a tripod emblazoned with the intricate sigil of the engineer’s sect. She dropped the heavy knapsack she carried and made quick work of building the largest field cannon Hester had ever seen, then began intently loading it. Purple-black bolts of light hailed down around her.
“Hurry up with that, forger!”
“Get me some cover,” she growled. A lanky young man also dressed in livery came up beside her, drawing his longbow and sending a volley of arrows into the dark. The creature howled with displeasure.
It turned toward the torchlit square and Hester saw it for the first time. The hulking, lumbering demon towered over them all. It sat up on two well-muscled haunches and shifted its massive weight toward them. The wide mouth was a tooth-filled slash that occupied the whole of what might have been a face. One large, faceted eye bulged out at them as the beast roared with dank, sulphurous breath.
Hester quailed.
“Step up, little noble caster. Do you heal or can you use your magic for offense?”
She blinked up at an imposing woman who stood above her, silver streaking her thick black hair. “Pardon me, madame?”
“I will ask again, and I will use small words. Can you fight? Yes or no?”
“I…I have never...”
She sighed. “Liability, then. Learn to do something useful, or keep your pretty face out of the way, got that, princess? I have no time for spoiled Regalii brats.” She turned on her booted heel and whispered to a handful of others. They cast suspicious glances back, and one even snickered.
“Pay them no mind; those Aldias are trouble.” Anna Gyony leaned on her quarterstaff. “Stay with the Vedma healers, they will show you how it’s done.” She winked. “But look sharp now, we are in for some trouble. That beastie, he’s not alone.”
From across the wide courtyard, a steady procession of torches approached them. Hester squinted into the darkness.
“Are those…people? What are we supposed to do, then? We cannot lay a finger on them!”
“No worries, my dear princess. They have sold their souls and we cannot worry about that particular oath when it comes to them.”
The field cannon cracked the darkness with a plume of smoke, and the demonic giant flinched, nearly toppling backward. It regained its balance by wrapping its four spindly long-fingered arms around the well in the center of the paving stones, breaking the decorative tile roof off as it righted itself. It belched forth a hazy miasma from its mouth, shaking its lumberous head from side to side, the sepentile tongue lolling like a dog’s.
The Aldias spellcasters were busy picking off the groundlings. They were easily severed body from soul and dropped to the ground, motionless and dead. It was a quick and bloodless killing, but it turned Hester’s stomach nonetheless.
A ragged arrow buried itself between two cobblestones, and Anna stepped in front of Hester. “Those are poisoned,” she warned, swinging her staff like a club and battering the arrow to pieces. “Do not touch them. At all.” She kicked the shards into a neat pile some feet away and resumed her position.
A few Gyony front-liners and the little Insinori were making their way back to their positions. The Vedma descended upon them, laying their hands on the wounds. The Insinori girl all but fell into Hester’s lap. Her hands were blistered and raw, and she bled from a deep shoulder wound. Hester put her arms around the girl; the Insinori was hardly more t
han a child, well short of her age of majority.
“What do I do?” said Hester.
“Whatever you can. I will try to get you some help.” Anna made a graceful leap across a feverish Gyony and tapped one of the Vedma on the shoulder. The dark-skinned woman rose and glanced toward Hester. She scowled and shook her head.
“Please,” Hester shouted, “I think she’s dying.”
“Go back inside with the other royals, girl. There is no place for you here. You will do more harm than good!”
The Insinori shuddered, and Hester put her hands on the girl as she saw the others doing. “I have no idea what I am doing, but I am going to try my best to help you.”
The girl blinked up at her with violet eyes narrowed in pain. “I lost my cover,” she hissed. “He died protecting me. The cannon’s been hit. I can fix it, but—” she coughed wetly, “I need to get back out there. I am the only one who can. Got me one last charge. I was packing it full of Blessedwood splinters when I went down. If we take down the beastie, we all go home. If not...” Her voice died in a convulsion of coughing and she spat up a mouthful of blood.
Hester gripped her hands. “Stay with me, sweet girl. Just stay with me.” Behind them, she heard her husband shouting.
“Marius, go home!” she called back to him.
“Everything is blocked. I came to see how I could help.”
“By staying out of the way!” She turned her attention back to the young girl in her lap.
Hester closed her eyes and blotted out all sound save for the labored breathing of the engineer. In her mind’s eye, she could see the broken ribs digging into the girl’s lungs. She could feel the sting of blisters forming across not only her hands but up both forearms as well. Carefully, she lifted the injuries away one by one until the girl seemed whole. The Insinori girl’s eyes flashed open, focused and alert. She hopped up and dashed back into the fray, leaving Hester reeling.
“I thought you said you had never healed before,” Anna said, almost playfully.
Hester shrugged.
“Well done.”
She smiled, but the weight of the engineer’s injuries plagued her. She mentally shifted them from hand to hand, but she did not know what to do with them. She could not put them down, she could not throw them aside. So, she swallowed them.
For a moment, it seemed like the right thing to have done. The report of the cannon echoed through her still-quiet mental space, followed by the roar of the beast.
She smiled and made to stand, but pain wrapped around her and her knees gave way. Each breath came with a rending of her lungs; blood began to bubble up into her throat. She staggered, and her husband elbowed his way to her, catching her in his arms.
“Charlotte,” she whispered, “where is she?”
“Safe,” Marius assured her.
“No, not here. Not safe here. You and she—” the pain seized her and crushed the breath from her body, “must both go!”
“What’s going on here?” Anna stooped over them both. “Princess? How are you hurt?”
Hester could only shake her head, she was too overwhelmed to speak. Anna glanced toward the front line, then back to Hester.
“Dear Lord, you just…wait here. Judith!”
The healer emerged from the shadows and frowned at Hester. “Good for nothing,” she spat. “I had to leave good fighters to come and care for you.” The Vedma’s accent was strange and twisted with anger. “What did you think to take on her injuries like that? So you can die from them instead and have us all to decorate the gallows when your mother finds out? Do not look at me like that, child. I know who your mother is, just as I know who you are: Hester Regalii, run off with a mortal and got with child, too. And here she is, the Prodigal Daughter, battling the legions of Hell with us plebeians.”
Tears welled in Hester’s eyes and she trembled, blood oozing from her close-pressed lips.
“Be easy with her, Judith, she came to help.” Anna’s voice was stern. “Do you see her sister or her cousin lifting a finger out here? And there are few among us blessed with the ability to heal through that kind of empathic prowess. Besides, I like her.”
“Enough. This is going to take time to unravel. Husband of Hester, help me take her into the banquet hall. It will be quieter there and I can make sense of the mess she has made of herself. Plus, if she has been spotted, especially by the groundlings, they’ll stop at nothing to see her dead. Little would upset the Primacy more than to lose the Grand Dame’s wayward daughter before she is brought back into the fold. Pick her up, I said! Hurry now.”
“Be gentle,” Anna admonished.
Marius carefully scooped her into his arms. Every little movement was a fresh sea of agony. Hester moaned, but no one paid her any mind. With Judith at his side, Marius ran back to the hall where a score of servants, nobility, and the host of Regalii were waiting out the battle.
Judith swept the fine porcelain dinnerware from a table and ordered Marius to lay his wife down upon it. The healer was not gentle in the slightest as she prodded Hester’s ribcage. The screams were lost in the rising darkness that threatened to envelop her.
Outside, the furor grew louder. She heard Anna’s voice clearly, but the word was foreign. “Automation!”
I must be about to die. I pray that clever child lives; I do not want my death to be entirely in vain.
Judith paused. “That hussy cannot possibly mean they have one of those.”
The walls shook as if every brick built into them were trying to tear itself lose and run away. Those who remained in the hall began to back away very slowly, even Judith, leaving Hester alone and immobile on the table. The nearby window shattered and the wall collapsed, sending a wave of debris cascading down over her. All she could do was roll onto her side and cover her face from the impact of stone and glass. What came through the wall was a blur of rusting metal and grinding gears with a foot as large as a haywagon. It moved on its own, with no driver and no apparent consciousness, like a child’s toy gone rogue. But Hester recognized a figure clinging to the back of one iron thigh. The Insinori girl was scrambling up the automation’s back, her knapsack jouncing and her curls plastered to her skull with blood and sweat. She pulled a tool from her pack and with it dug into the motorized creature.
The thing began to slow as the girl pried open a hatch, and a gust of metallic steam blasted out. The last thing Hester saw before darkness came for her at last was the little engineer’s face, half eaten away by caustic burns. One violet eye still twinkled as she raised her wrench in salute. Hester drifted away as the automation crashed to its knees and came apart at the joints with a din that would have woken the dead.
* * * *
The morning light was not kind. From beneath the overturned table, Hester could see naught but death and destruction. Cold autumn air blew in through the open wall, carrying the heavy stench of rot, both demon and Nephilim alike. From outside there was moaning, crying, but within it was silent as the grave. Bricks and wood had tumbled down over the table, much of it pinning her to the floor. A delicate hand lay exposed like a root nearby. Hester thought she recognized the signet ring, but she could not be certain.
“Help,” she rasped, her throat caked with dust and dried blood. “Please, someone help me.”
A shadow, then a movement in the rubble. A man’s face appeared before her, light haired with a square jaw bearing deep wounds that would surely scar. She knew his name and whispered it aloud like a prayer. “Cadmus Gyony.”
“Lady Hester.” His surprise was evident. “You live!”
“I do. At least, I think I do.”
“Help here,” Cadmus bellowed. Footsteps came, and with them hands bringing more daylight and more foul air. She could smell smoke and charred meat. “Lie still, my lady.”
“For God’s sake, please call me Hester.”
He touched her hand. “Indeed, Hester. Emile! Where is that page? Emile! Get over here and make use of yourself.”
With e
xceeding grace, the lithe young man crept into the little cavern and knelt alongside her. He stroked her forehead tenderly, but said nothing. It felt like hours passed before she could be freed. Cadmus sent for a litter, although Hester objected.
“Lady…Hester, your leg is surely broken. Please, let us help. You have done so much for us.”
“I have?”
Cadmus nodded, pointing to the heap of rust and iron in the center of the smoldering ruins. Although Anna’s left arm was in a sling, hastily made of the manor’s curtains, she was carefully wrapping something atop the pile. She shifted the long parcel gently and out tumbled a wrench, clattering end over end until it came to rest on the scarred wood floor. Hester gasped.
“Kitty Insinori. She was one of the youngest ever to be inducted into the League of Engineers. She was a marvelous clever thing, too.” Cadmus surreptitiously wiped at his eyes. “She will be missed, but she won us the day. They did not expect us to have her with us tonight.”
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