The Censor's Hand: Book One of the Thrice~Crossed Swords Trilogy

by A. M. Steiner

  “N’gnog, Ulnzhro.”

  Some freedom of movement returned to Daniel’s body. He rose to his knees and turned his head. Gleame stood in the doorway, holding his jewelled cane in an obscure alignment. Its head shone like a constellation of dying stars. Unfathomable vowels and consonants issued from his mouth, though his lips did not move.

  “Ph’ep, Ooboshu.”

  Bolb screamed in rage. Tools and artefacts flew at Gleame from the walls, were deflected by an invisible force. Blood oozed from Bolb’s nose.

  “Ebunma, N’gotha.”

  Daniel’s body stopped trembling. It felt bruised and weak, as if stretched on a rack. He shivered some energy into his muscles. Albertus’s hanger was only an arm’s length away. He saw his chance, dived for the blade and plunged it through the hem of Bolb’s skirt.

  Bolb collapsed with a wail and the room crashed into silence.

  Daniel rolled onto his back and listened to the shocked complaints of his body.

  Corbin clambered back to his feet, his longsword in his hand, a frightful look in his eye. He raised the blade overhead and slashed the point of it down through Bolb’s pitiful body. The master’s ornate robe split apart, and slumped around him. Bolb cowered in his undergarments clutching at his bleeding calf.

  “Master Pendolous Bolb,” Corbin said, “in the name of the Brotherhood and all that is just, you are under arrest.”

  Gleame winced at the words as he checked Albertus’s pulse. He turned to Bolb, his face torn between anger and incomprehension. “This is an outrage,” he said.

  His guards appeared at the door.

  Bolb’s reply was sullen. “The Convergence would not exist were it not for me.”

  “This is no longer a matter for the Convergence,” Corbin said as he hoisted Bolb to his feet by the scruff of his neck, practically lifting the fat man off the ground. “Are you alright?” he asked Daniel.

  By way of illustration, Daniel put his finger in his mouth and pulled out a few tiny fragments of tooth.

  “Good work, son. Very good. Now come with me, we’ve secrets to learn.”

  “First I must make my report to Lang,” Daniel said.

  For an instant, Corbin was angry, and then his shoulders slumped.

  “You’re right, I suppose. Meet me in the cells when you’re done.”

  Daniel saluted from the floor, hand to neck. “Justice Advances.”

  The words never tasted sweeter.

  Corbin marched Bolb from the room. Albertus made a groaning noise, and sat upright. He groggily rubbed the darkening bruise on his forehead, and clicked his nose back into place. Gleame ordered one of his guards to follow Corbin, the other to carry Albertus to the infirmary. He turned his attention to Daniel.

  “Lang certainly knows how to pick his men.”

  Daniel looked at the wreckage around him. He had destroyed the master’s room two nights in a row. That had to be some kind of achievement. Young aspirants would be reading about the case in years to come. He would make a point of describing the damage in his report.

  Riven Gahst

  Miranda peered through the narrow window at a featureless sky. What had Edmund called it? An embrasure. Riven Gahst’s room was not much bigger than a prison cell. The shells of several hundred sea urchins hung from its ceiling suspended in silver nets. His bed was little more than a plank. Actually, it was a plank. That Gahst had let her in himself had surprised her most of all. For a master not to have a coterie of servants seemed the greatest of his eccentricities.

  “This isn’t what I expected,” she said.

  Gahst was wearing his peculiar garb – a skirted corset, strapped leather, and of course the metal that pierced his head and hands.

  “This cell is close to the library, which has always been my greatest passion,” he said, his tongue spike clattering disconcertingly. “Miranda, you waste your time in visiting me. I will not support your promotion to the Convocation, no matter how hard you plead.”

  It was reasonable of him to assume that was why she had come. “Do you think it is an unsuitable role for a woman?” she asked.

  His laugh sounded like the cough of a dying man.

  “I have no doubt of your powers, Miranda. I oppose you because I am certain of them. You have a wealth of talent, unusual gifts, but you must understand that I have not voted in favour of a promotion for more than a decade. Two, perhaps. There are too many masters as it is. Far too many.” He looked sad, as if he were retelling a joke that nobody ever understood.

  “I did not come here to ask for your support; I came here to ask for an explanation.”

  “I do not need to justify myself to the likes of you.”

  “Maybe I am being unclear. I am interested in your theories.”

  The metalwork around his face rattled angrily. “Because they are inconvenient to the creation of wealth. I have no time for demi-masters who hope to win favour with Gleame by disproving my work.”

  “No,” Miranda said sharply, and Gleame recoiled. It was funny, she thought, how confused some men got when a woman took command. She sat down on his plank. It was as uncomfortable as it looked, but at least it wasn’t covered in nails. “My mother taught me that the least comfortable thoughts are the ones that deserve the most attention. I come of my own accord and with an open mind, seeking knowledge.” She crossed her hands upon her knees to make sure he understood she wasn’t leaving without an answer. Gahst pulled nervously at the wires between his brow and his lips, causing him to grin and frown at the same time.

  “Mother, you call her, but you are not of the duchess’s flesh.” He paced the room. His thorn-wood skirt scratched on the floor like kindling being dragged to a funeral pyre.

  “I am a ward of the duchess. We are her sorrow and her joy.”

  Gahst didn’t seem to hear. Miranda could see his mind racing. She watched impassively as his expression cycled, like a wheel of fortune, through suspicion, fear and hope. When it settled, his eyes seemed almost feverish.

  “Yes. Your genius. Maybe you will understand, can make her see. Maybe you are the one.” He knelt at her feet and she winced at the crunching of the thorns against the bare flagstones.

  “Show me your secrets,” she whispered, like a trusted confidant. He was putty in her hands now, and Miranda had absorbed too much incoherent lunacy in the last month to fear any more.

  “I have not invested magic in a decade. The trappings I wear are the only remnant of my craft. I have devoted all of my time to hekalogy – the study of what magic is and where it comes from.”

  “Your ‘Theory of Hidden Makers’?”

  “More than that. Its true nature.”

  “Magic is like fire or wind, so says Master Turon.”

  “A metaphor is not an explanation. It would be better to say that magic is like light, taken for granted by all, but with no understanding of what it really is. Nobody knows, and nobody seems to care. That is the problem. I have devoted my life to that question. Does magic have a cost? Do we borrow from our Hidden Maker without truly understanding the terms? What if the terms are not in our favour?”

  “But surely the Hidden Makers are also a metaphor? It is we, the Cunning, who do the real making.”

  “Oh no. Not at all.”

  “So what are they?”

  “I have seen them revealed – in numbers and in dreams.” Gahst dragged a writing chest from under Miranda’s seat and withdrew a ragged map, which he rolled open across the length of the chamber’s floor. The chart was impossible to follow, a labyrinth of equations, symbols and orbits. He jabbed at signs and numbers like a child squashing ants. “See here, and here, and here.”

  As Miranda looked closer, she saw that the document was a collage – cuttings from ancient tomes sewn to fresh vellum and marked by Gahst’s spindly hand. It seemed a portrait of madness.

 
; “My calculations show that there must be other convergences, in other universes. They are the Hidden Makers. Not people, not at all. The magic we invest is not only that which we create, it is part of an ocean. One that we drain to irrigate our land. We take our magic from other worlds. I will show you.”

  Miranda let Gahst speak for an hour or more. He did so rapidly, without pause for breath or punctuation, explaining synchronicities she could barely see, and reciting magimatical formulae that she did not understand. Then without warning, he wheezed like a donkey and fell silent.

  “Do you see? Not yet. I go too far, too quickly. You must come again. Learn more while we still have time.” He rocked back and forth on his haunches. Dots of blood welled on his thigh where the thorns had freshly pierced.

  “Are you feeling unwell?” Miranda asked.

  He could not hear. He was speaking only to himself now, lost in his mind. “When you understand, you will persuade Gleame. You will persuade your mother. Yes. They will listen to you.”

  Gahst grabbed the hem of her dress, began to pull at it. Miranda raised her hand to slap him and remembered the fishhooks that protruded from his eyebrows.

  “Master Gahst.” Her outraged shout brought him back to his senses. His whole body shook as he carefully replaced the scroll in its case. Miranda was beginning to feel a little scared. She waited until he appeared calmer. “Persuade them to do what?”

  “To bring an end to this madness. Miranda, my theories prove that the Convergence is a house of cards, that for years we have been taking far more magic from it than we could possibly hope to replace. All of that magic, that power has been spread across the world. Imagine what could happen if, all at once, it were taken back. Or worse yet, cut loose.”

  Alarmist. Paranoid. Gahst’s rantings were the worst kind of outlandish speculation. They reminded Miranda of those scurrilous pamphlets that claimed every shocking event in history to be the result of some vast conspiracy.

  “So what are you suggesting? That we diminish our efforts? What about those who depend upon us? The colonies in the Far West? The threat of the Evangelicy?”

  What about the power of the North? she thought.

  “It is too late for that. The Convergence must be abandoned – completely.”

  Gahst was insane. No wonder Gleame wished to discredit him.

  “On the basis of your speculation? Even if your theory of other worlds is correct, there are no reasons for concern, no signs of danger. That hardly seems like a crisis to me.”

  “That is the whole point, Miranda. Don’t you understand? No crisis is shocking in the making. That is precisely why they happen. The apocalypse does not carry a calling card or send a herald in advance. If there were signs of danger, people would be forced to act, the disaster would be prevented. The end of the world does not come expected; it sneaks and it prowls.”

  Miranda stood and brushed down her skirt.

  “I have taken too much of your time, Master Gahst,” she said. In addition, wasted too much of my own. He saw that he had lost her.

  “I have not convinced you. You must come again. I beg of you, Miranda. I will present my thoughts more clearly.” Something in his desperation delighted her.

  “On two conditions.”

  “Anything.”

  “First, you must support my election to the Convocation.” She held up her hand to pre-empt his objection. “If I am to speak on your behalf, that is where my voice will be heard most loudly and all the more so for the rarity of your blessing.” Gahst would see the sense in that proposal, whether or not there was any. “Secondly, you will explain to me what this is.”

  She handed him the tiny scroll from her bodice, warm and a little damp from her skin.

  He held it at arm’s length, pinched between his split nails. As he read, he seemed to both shrink and become light, as if an unpopular king forced to abdicate from a throne that he hated.

  “I have no time left,” he said. “The hand has been found.”

  Miranda was gripped by the inescapable feeling that she had made a terrible mistake.

  “Yes, it has.”

  “Where is it now?”

  “With Chairman Gleame.”

  “I see.” She seemed to fade from Gahst’s sight then, become a ghost to him. Gahst undid his skirt and let it fall to the floor with a clatter. He slowly began to untie his corset, revealing the taut, grey flesh of his back.

  “What is the hand?”

  “A complete audit of the Convergence and its entire works. Every one of its secrets.”

  “You planned to betray its secrets. That censor discovered your plot – and you killed him.” Miranda stepped away from him, suddenly afraid.

  “Maybe I did.” Gahst slipped the corset from his shoulders and began to unhook his piercings. “But I betrayed no one. I was betrayed. I cannot understand how. The censors have inflicted countless harm on our kind, but Adelmus and I understood each other. It’s hard to like censors, they are hard men – but I liked him. I trusted him. I thought he was honourable.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Whoever killed Adelmus won’t have any trouble dealing with me. I’m just an old man.”

  That was true. Standing unadorned, he looked commonplace, like one of the gardeners at the orphanage. He stood before her stark naked, handed her his huge scroll, and a palm book from his desk. “These contain everything you need to know. Do with them as you will. Now leave me alone.”

  She took the documents, tucked them under her arm and left.

  On the way back to her chambers, she stopped by Sutton’s room. When she knocked on the door there was no answer. She scribbled a note to him quickly, telling him to call her urgently. Then she noticed there was a man in the corridor outside. He looked like an ordinary porter, but there was something strange in the way he watched her. Somney had been right to warn her. She could feel danger in the air – true danger, drawing close around her like a net.

  The Bell Street massacre

  The strongbox seemed to get heavier with every crunching step towards the Bell Jar. Jon tried to keep the rhythm of his pace steady, but he could not stop the damned thing from swinging. Its engraved handles were coming loose in their brackets and bit deep into his fingers. He resisted the urge to pause for breath. If he stopped, then he would start to think about the killing, and he might not be able to continue.

  You have no choice. Think of your family.

  Barehill had set the candle to ignite in less than an hour. Jon imagined the bombard in the base of the strongbox shifting, the timer slipping, the candlewick sparking into life and igniting the powder, blasting him into fiery oblivion. Scattering him and Laila across the street in a shower of coins and broken limbs. He wanted to vomit.

  Keep moving, one foot at a time. Anna. The baby. Anna. The baby.

  It didn’t help that it hurt to breathe. His chest was bruised and swollen, the pain of the previous night made real by his sobriety, and multiplied by his hangover. At least he could remember now. What had he been thinking, to imagine that he could salvage the soul of the murderous wench who traipsed behind him? What kind of an idiot confused the urgings of wine with the will of the gods?

  Laila carried the other end of the strongbox. She was disguised in a cloak and breeches, her breasts strapped down tight. You’d still have to be blind to mistake her for a man. Why Laila? She was half his size, barely able to hold up her end. Jon could hear her puffing with the effort. Because she would see the job done, no matter what. That was why. Before they’d left the mill, she had loaded a pistol in front of him, no bigger than her fist, two barrels, over and under. She’d never said it, but he knew that it was meant for him, in case he tried to run.

  Peacock’s curfew had yet to be lifted and the streets were empty, eerily devoid of the night urchins and bandits who normally sought the pennies
of the sympathetic and the easily intimidated.

  They reached the unnamed stretch between Urikon Street and Swan Alley and turned into the top end of Badly Street, sticking to the shadows. Jon halted suddenly. Laila slipped and he felt the chest crash painfully into the back of his knees. For a moment, the whole of its weight was on his sore knuckles, and his wrists twisted backwards, close to breaking. Then Laila had the other end again, and he was left with a numbing pain and a heart thudding so loudly he imagined she could hear it.

  The orange flag of the Turbulence militia hung limply over the entrance to the Bell Jar, illuminated by the dim light of a brazier. Three guards stood on lookout, a ramshackle arquebusier, a crossbowman who looked more like a peasant on a hunt than a soldier, and closest, a bill man. Wisps of conversation drifted over to him, talk of women and war.

  He needed to call ahead, to make sure that the militiamen were not surprised into action by his unexpected appearance, but his throat would not obey. His head went light and a throbbing sigh ebbed and swelled in his ears. He foresaw the calamity of what he was being told to do, imagined the mangled bodies and ruined lives.

  These people are all insane. The Freeborn, the gangs, the militia, even the censors. All they care about is killing each other.

  He looked over his shoulder. Laila had sensed his uncertainty, was watching him like a viper. The pistol was already in her hand.

  “I’m going to count down from five,” she said.

  He couldn’t do it. He hated Peacock, thought him evil, maybe even wanted him dead, but that wasn’t the same thing as blowing him and his friends to pieces.

  There had to be a reason for all of this, for fate to have led him to a place so strange. Jon looked up as Laila whispered down the numbers. She-who-reflects-his-glory was nothing more than a waning crescent in the sky, slim to almost gone. He had always prayed to her for wisdom. It had rarely come.

  “Zero,” Laila said. “Don’t force me to kill you.”

  Jon’s bowels loosened.