The Queen of Lies

by Michael J. Bode

  He looked the part.

  “I’m looking for the priest,” he growled.

  “Upstairs. Second door on the right,” the innkeeper stammered.

  “Shitty weather,” the hunter commented offhandedly.

  “Y-yes. The queen’s moods have been erratic as of late. But the farmers aren’t complaining. We need the rain.”

  “Yeah.” He didn’t feel like finishing the conversation. The weather didn’t read like brontomancy either. Weatherly was a good fifty miles from Reda, and Satryn, empress’s brat or not, wouldn’t have the juice to maintain a squall this far out.

  He headed up the stairs to the rooms and pounded on the door. “Priest! Open up.”

  The door swung open, spilling warm light into the hallway. Heath leaned against the doorframe, bare from the waist up. His chocolate-colored chest was covered in old scars. He grinned. “Sword, we need to work on your manners. It’s impolite to intrude on a gentleman’s personal time.”

  “You need to get dressed,” Sword snarled. “Unnatural theurgies are spilling out of the orphanage. You can rub one out when the job is done and this shit hole is behind us.”

  Heath walked over to a battered old wardrobe and pulled out his leather jerkin. “How many warlocks?”

  “Half a dozen to thirteen,” Sword said. “I watched the door for most of the day while you were doing Ohan’s work in the selectman’s office, thank you very much. No one in or out. Best entry point is a pantry door facing the shipyard. And partner, I don’t like this weather.”

  “For your information, I was finessing the local authorities all day. This isn’t going to play well for the constable any way it goes down, but I did let him negotiate me into parting with two thousand ducats to fund a new orphanage.” Heath slipped on his jerkin. “So you think the storm’s related, or is this just another item to add to the growing list of your new host body’s dislikes?”

  Sword grimaced and scratched his bony hand. “I wouldn’t mention if it wasn’t important.” His current skin suit was prone to irritation and paranoia, which were actually some of its more charming traits. After the untimely death of Lord Dalrymple, the abbess had dug this asshole up out of the bowels of the Invocari prison—life imprisonment, with no hope for execution.

  “Noted,” Heath said, strapping on his springblades. “Did you happen to come up with a plan for once we get inside?”

  “Kill everyone,” Sword said.

  Heath rolled his eyes. “I was thinking a little more tactically. Your body still looks like it’s spent the last twenty years locked in a five-by-five cell. Are you able to fight?”

  “Twenty one years, three months, two weeks, and five days….” Sword shut his eyes. “In a hellishly cold ice prison in the lightless bowels of the Invocari dungeons. Sometimes without food or water for days at a time. The only thing that kept me alive was the thought that I didn’t deserve the mercy of death.”

  “Uh-huh.” Heath crossed his arms. “Those were all horrible things…that happened to someone else.”

  “Didn’t need to know about them.” Sword stared him dead in the eye.

  Heath leaned in, his expression softening. “I need to know I can rely on you. So can you get that scrambled head of yours together enough to pull this off?”

  “Appreciate the concern”—Sword cracked a smile—“but the abbess ain’t no fool. I’m deadly as ever.” He extended his hand and flexed his fingers, willing a ball of fire into existence. The flames were mesmerizing as they danced, bending the air around them. The crackle of the blaze was like a song.

  “I’ll never get used to that.” Heath flicked his eyes briefly down to Sword’s flame.

  “I know lots of magic,” Sword replied cagily, “more than anyone’s probably forgotten. Just don’t like to use it. The whole point of being a sword is to cut, but this body’s still too stiff. Try spending two decades in a cell too small to stand in.” It was different having seals again; the binding schools of magic were most closely related to the one that had forged him.

  “Spell-casting sword, assassin priest…a little different from our normal routine. But this could work.” Heath rubbed his chin.

  With great effort of will, Sword extinguished his hungry, beautiful flames. The world felt emptier without the presence of all-consuming fire.

  Heath grabbed a length of rope out of his backpack and slung it over his shoulder. He secured one end to a metal grappling hook. “I’m thinking we come at this a different way. We don’t know what we’ll face once we’re inside. So let’s not go in.”

  “Burn it down?” Sword smiled gleefully. The house was old and weathered, the wood in need of treatment. The thatched roof would dance in a pageant of fire…if only it weren’t wet from the storm. Maybe that was why he hated rainy weather. “Too wet.”

  “So we burn it from the inside,” Heath suggested. “What’s the best way to burn down a house?”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yes,” Heath reiterated. “It’s not classy, but we can’t take on six or more warlocks, and I don’t want to wait for the abbess to send backup and cut our bounty. The local clergy are true believers—they would have a crisis of faith over this.”

  Sword rubbed his bony hands together. “Start in the basement. That’ll seal off the exit through the tunnels, if there is one. Some lamp oil on the support beams could bring the whole thing down on itself. The fire will work its way upward, so if we can have fuel there, the blaze will engulf the place fast. What about collateral damage?”

  “The fire should stay contained if you actually know what you’re talking about.” Heath shrugged. “As far as I’m concerned, everyone in that house is a fair target. We have total absolution on this one in any event.”

  “Tonight?”

  “There should be pine pitch at the shipyard. Barrels of it. We’ll get it into the cellar first. Then I’ll bring it up through the house as far as I can go without being spotted. I’ll give the signal, and you start the blaze downstairs. A jump from a second-story window is a broken leg at worst—nothing I can’t heal. I’ll take out stragglers as they come. You can join me and help finish them off.”

  “The locals?”

  “I explained the situation to the mayor and constable. The citizens can’t know this was sanctioned by the Orthodoxy,” Heath explained. “If we need a scapegoat, you take the fall as usual. I’ll pretend to be a concerned senior officiate of the Orthodoxy ready to offer my healing services. You get a speedy execution, and I carry the blade back to Rivern.”

  “Every time I think Daphne can’t find a worse body, she finds one.”

  “She won’t.” Heath smiled. “You’re ugly even for you. And you’re even more uncouth than usual. And frankly you scare me a little.”

  “You sure about this?” Sword asked, “It’s an orphanage. Some people would have a problem with that.”

  “Why do you think I had you verify the accusation instead of just laying waste to the target the second we got to this miserable hamlet?” Heath said testily.

  “In my day they had actual witch trials,” Sword affirmed.

  “What’s the point of a trial if the verdict’s always guilty?”

  “When do we start?”

  SAINT LUCIAN’S ORPHANAGE was a simple two-story building on the outskirts of Reda.

  In the days of the early church, before the Orsini Council, the real Saint Lucian was a healer of impressive talent known for his predilection for young boys, especially those who had no home. The Cantos remembered him as a protector of lost youth. The council either had a very short memory or a keen sense of irony.

  Sword had been tempted to take two barrels of pitch from the shipyard, but his body was still feeble, and Heath, naturally, refused to carry anything. Sword’s Seal of Movement dragged one barrel along as they made their way through the driving rain to the orphanage.

  Heath took only a few seconds to pick the lock on the back door. Sword tapped the doorframe with his blade to dispel th
e warding enchantments. He had been forged to cut through magic as well as flesh, and modern theurgies were weak at best. They broke like glass.

  The door led to a darkened pantry and a set of stairs leading down to a cellar. There were no lights on the first floor. The sounds of children chanting echoed from upstairs, like simple rhymes of playground in a language long forgotten. Heath moved quietly as he found a stout metal pot and held it out in front of him.

  Sword waved his hand, and the lid on the pitch barrel pried itself off and silently floated near a pile of firewood next to an iron stove. He willed a tendril of the viscous substance to collect in Heath’s pot.

  They shared a nod, and Sword went downstairs, the pitch barrel hovering in tow. In his early life, he had been joined with mages of incredible power, so the novelty of his host’s seals gave him only the slightest bit of pleasure. He doubted his vessel could even pull off a basic Sarnite hex, but one made do with the tools one was given.

  The cellar was completely dark, so he brought a small flame to his finger, no more than a candle. If the people who ran this place had any notion of fire safety, it didn’t show. Laid out on shelves were a cornucopia of dry flammable materials: bedding, grain—hells, even lamp oil—to say nothing of the cobweb-encrusted shelves they rested on.

  Sword swatted at his shoulder, and his fingers brushed against something small and foreign. He snatched it in his hand and brought it in front of him. A hairy spider crawled slowly across his palm.

  Memories returned of his time in the lightless oubliettes in the deep earth. Things crawling over his shivering, naked body, through his hair. Centipedes, spiders…Fucking spiders! What do spiders even have to eat so far underground? The arachnid reared up, its legs retracting from the rising heat in Sword’s palm.

  The spider started fervently in each direction, desperate to escape the slowly growing heat. Sword smiled as smoke rose from its body. It flipped over in its final death throes, its tiny legs flailing up at the sky. Sword maintained the rippling heat at a low, even rate until the body was still and crispy.

  He relished the taste as he popped the creature into his mouth and crunched it between his teeth. There was a trick to getting them to that perfect level of smoky flavor.

  “Mmmmph!” a woman’s muffled voice said.

  Sword cast about the cellar until he found a sac of webbing he’d mistaken for a pile of sheets. It was roughly woman shaped—and a hefty woman at that. A single blue eye peered desperately from the strands of spider silk.

  He pulled out his blade and ran it against the cocoon. It was tougher than silk should have been, but he could cut through the enchantment. Hands and limbs burst from the silk and frantically grabbed at the strands, shredding them now that the spell had been broken.

  The woman looked to be middle-aged, with corn-silk-blond hair and a haunted expression. She blubbered, “Please, please, please…don’t kill me! I have a grandson and a good-for-nothing husband and a lousy job, but I don’t deserve to die here.”

  “Run,” Sword said.

  She picked herself off the ground, hands brushing furiously at the sticky webbing. “You’re not one of them?”

  Sword peered at her and raised his blade to her neck. “Are you?”

  “No!” Her eyes were wet with tears.

  Sword indicated the door with his head.

  “Thank you.”

  “Wait.”

  She froze.

  He reached out his hand and pulled a spider out of her hair with his seal. The thing floated helplessly above his palm. “Now you can go.”

  She laughed. She couldn’t help it. The whole situation was probably too much, and Sword wasn’t going to make it any better by eating another fried spider in front of her. But he wasn’t used to eating regularly, and the first one had whetted his appetite.

  “Get the fuck out of here,” he scolded.

  “Is it safe?” Suddenly overwhelmed with worry, she glanced up the stairs to the pantry.

  “You’re ten feet from the exit, you stupid…” Sword sighed and handed her his blade. “Look, just take this and leave it outside when you’re clear of this place. I’ll be able to find it. And if you have any mind to keep it…don’t.”

  She took it in her hands and raised it in front of her. “Thank you,” she whispered as she fled up the steps.

  Sword cooked the spider, ate it, and went back to work. He willed the pitch barrel to the center of the room and, with his mind, brought forth long tentacles of sap to caress every flammable surface in sight.

  Absently he brushed another spider off his shoulder and saw two more on his hand. They burned to ash instantly, but a carpet of swarming arachnids poured out from the ceiling and the cracks in the basement foundation. He felt a hot sting of agony as one bit his neck.

  As if on cue, he heard Heath’s muffled shouts from upstairs. It was a shrill string of panicked expletives consistent with one being covered in venomous spiders.

  He sifted through the memories of his borrowed life. He thought back to those sunny spring days in the Lyceum courtyard, sketching with his fellow Scholars. He wanted to be an engineer, to use his Seal of Fire to power the steam engines of Rivern’s great industry. He remembered setting his first fire…and his last. It wasn’t a lot as far as happy memories went.

  He lit the blaze.

  An effulgent conflagration blinded him as tendrils of flame raced over everything in sight. The heat scorched his skin. He was immune to the flames he emanated but not fire that burned its own fuel. That’s why they had kept him naked, why they had fed him soggy slop, why they had imprisoned him in that cold dank cell.

  The crackling fire ate mercilessly at the wood and fed gluttonously on the pitch as the licks of fire climbed higher and the scent of smoke filled the wavering air. The roar and crackle spread through the house. Spiders died in droves, emitting high-pitched, tormented screams as the blaze consumed their bodies. His own agony was an afterthought.

  Sword cackled maniacally as he turned his fire on full blast, pulling at the weakened support of the building with his other seal. Heath will be fine. His skin crawled with raw anguish, but the paralytic in the spider venom provided a buffer that kept him from completely shutting down. He worked at the support beam until it broke, bringing tons of flaming timber and ash on top of him.

  And the tortured soul finally would be delivered to the embrace of his lifelong love.

  SWORD WATCHED THE blaze from behind a barrel in the alley.

  She smacked her forehead. “I told you to just leave it, you stupid…” As she sifted through the recent memories, it became apparent that she had recognized the monetary value of the blade and wanted to do the noble thing by returning it to the man who had saved her, even though every second she remained had terrified her half to death.

  Sword stood and brushed her hair back, raised her blade in front of her, and walked toward the inferno. The screams were a mixture of human and inhuman. An upper-story window encrusted with swarming spiders slowly revealed the blaze within as the creatures died off one by one. But nothing came through the pantry except smoke and the hot ripple of air.

  Absently she noted, from a memory that seemed almost too distant to recall, that the windows probably would blow out at any moment. The fire somehow was still accelerated by seal magic, which normally wasn’t possible, but sometimes seals worked better than they were intended.

  She headed toward the front. Broken glass from an exploding window sprayed into the alley, just missing her.

  Heath lay in the muddy street, one leg angled painfully beneath his prone body. His hands were pressed against this chest, softly glowing, as dual pinpricks of Light sparkled across this skin like twinkling stars in a night sky, sealing shut hundreds of spider bites. He didn’t look happy.

  A flaming figure hurled itself from the window—a child in a night-robe flailing wildly. She struck the ground beside them with a thud, and the body disintegrated into a swarm of spiders. The fire clung to thei
r carapaces as they curled, juddered, and burned to a crisp.

  “It’s not like you to land badly, love,” Sword said cheekily as she stuck her hand in the rain.

  Heath healed his shattered leg with the last flicker of his Light and dragged himself to his feet. “Sword?”

  “Name’s Catherine,” she said. “To the locals anyway. Not Cathy or Cath or Katrina or Kate or Caitlin or Kitty or Kay…and most certainly not Sword if I’m to be your cover story about why you’re out here, dressed in assassin’s clothes in front of a burning home for abandoned children.

  “Also…I’m forty eight, a proud grandmother, raising my deceased daughter’s son, and please don’t ask who the father is. I work as a knife sharpener because my lousy husband is too much of a drunk to keep a job, and he’s too busy whoring around to notice that I was detained by an evil spider cult in the basement of an orphanage and to alert the proper authorities…who likely could have handled this whole thing without calling in a pair of witch-hunters, thank you very much.”

  Someone yelled, “Fire!” in the distance.

  “Ah. That would be Henry,” Catherine explained. “Bit of a busybody since he lost his leg. Spends most of his time looking out his window and most definitely saw the whole thing. Given that you’re the only black man who’d set foot within a ten-mile radius of this backwater, it’s a fair wager he’ll have a good physical description when the guard comes running.”

  Heath shook his head. “I don’t feel good about any of this.”

  “Nonsense, love,” Sword reassured him. “I’m a pillar of this community and a regular fixture at church events. I’m a volunteer in the fire brigade even…Now if that’s not ironic, I don’t know what is, given my previous situation. We haven’t had a fire in Reda in years.”