by Sarah Remy
“My lord,” she said after a glance at Renault for permission.
“You were paying attention? Listening carefully?”
“Yes, my lord. His Majesty said I might.”
“Didn’t frighten you, did we?” Mal wondered. He’d argued that it was unkind, exposing children to stark truths, but Renault had insisted on honesty.
“The Red Worm plucked those two from childhood without warning,” the king had pointed out. “This time around, they deserve at least the illusion of control.”
“You see, Parsnip, why I’d prefer to keep you close,” Renault said now. “Within the city, where at least we can be certain our enemies won’t boil up out of the ground without warning. You’re safest here. Do you understand now?”
“Pardon, Majesty, my lords.” She included Baldebert in her quiet disdain. “But me and Arthur, we’d make you better soldiers than both of those priests together. At least me and Arthur, we know which end of the sword is sharp.”
At the back of the royal graveyard, closed behind a separate gray stone wall and an entirely mortal iron gate, Mal found Wilhaiim’s hidden lich graves. Here, behind the sheltering wall, the bones of Wilhaiim’s executed magi were interred. The gate was unlocked and not recently used. When he lifted the latch, flakes of rust fell from the iron onto the grass below. The hinges creaked as he coaxed the gate open, an eerie sound in an otherwise pleasant midday. Mal was no stranger to eerie sounds. He paid the squawking gate no mind as he picked up his spade and covered pail and hurried through the gate.
It closed behind him, latch clattering into place.
“Really, brother? Grave robbing?”
Mal didn’t reply. Rowan wasn’t there. Rowan was many years dead, lost at sea somewhere near the Black Coast. His ghost, if any such remained, haunted a grave fathoms deep. This thing, wearing Rowan’s cheerful smile and floppy dark curls, was only a hallucination, Mal’s madness taken form.
“Or mayhap your conscious,” Rowan suggested, looking intently around the lich yard. “Trying to talk some sense. Do you really think stealing the bones of your murdered predecessors is a wise idea?”
Wistful reason or madness manifested, Rowan had kept Mal chattering company all the way from his quarters, through the cemetery where together they laid flowers first on Siobahn’s grave and then Andrew’s. It had happened once before, on The Cutlass Wind. Then not-Rowan had saved Mal’s life. Today he seemed content with a lecture on morality, which Mal might have found hilarious, given what he recalled of his brother’s disreputable habits.
“Less humorous considering,” Mal muttered. He, too, glanced around the yard, noting the temple sigils still shining up and down the wall, and on the obelisk set midpoint in the grass.
“Don’t much like quarreling with yourself?” suggested Rowan. He wandered in a circle around the obelisk, buffing calloused fingers over the rough surface. “It’s a bit not good, this going batty, am I right? Likely of the waxing-and-waning variety. What do you think we’d see, if we opened your skull and peeked inside? You and Tillion, side by side on the table?”
“Less humorous considering if I’m arguing with myself,” continued Mal sharply over Rowan’s disparagement. “And as I fear your very presence suggests I’m not fully committed.” Mal tested the sod around the base of the obelisk with the toe of his boot. Choosing a likely spot, he began to dig. The spade cut grudgingly through grass. He lifted it up, brought it down again. And again. The force of it made his teeth jar.
“They’ll burn you one way or another,” Rowan agreed. He settled himself against the wall, crossed his legs at the ankles, prepared to wait. “If not for grave robbing, then at the end if you get yon monsters to walking. They’ll hang you, or burn you, like the poor man on Holder’s property, even if you do manage save your bloody king. Worth it, do you suppose?”
“It’s what I do.” Mal used the edge of his spade to peel back a square of grass. The soil was rocky beneath. He scraped and scooped then crouched to sift away larger stones.
“You never were so loyal as a wee lad.” Years in court had suppressed Mal’s seaside brogue. Rowan had it still.
“You never gave me the chance.”
Rowan fell to silence while Mal shifted spadeful after spadeful of dirt from his hole to an increasing pile on the grass. He was not concerned with being interrupted; the wall afforded him plenty of privacy even if anyone wandered so far into the cemetery as to stumble onto the lich yard. When he’d left the palace, Tillion had been busy on his pedestal extolling the virtues of courage in the face of adversity while at the same time blaming Renault for the god’s disfavor. And with Avani now having ridden out in the cavalry, there was not a person left who would willingly disturb Wilhaiim’s vocent at work. He was still the most powerful man in the city, and now thrice as frightening for his growing air of eccentricity.
“Batty,” Rowan corrected. “You would have been better off kept isolated at home.”
Scowling, Mal wiped sweat from his brow. “I wasn’t welcome, once our father realized.”
“Not in the Rose Keep,” Rowan agreed. “But there was nothing stopping you from setting up shop somewhere along the coast, brother. Driftwood cottage, a fishing line. A clever coastal man needs little else. You should have stayed a Serrano. Lord Malachi Doyle was always beyond your ken.”
“Be quiet,” Mal said, both hands clenched around the spade’s handle.
“At least alone on the coast,” Rowan added, “you’d do no one else any harm.”
“Be quiet, I said!” Mal snarled, hurling the spade in Rowan’s direction. It clattered against gray stone and bounced harmlessly away. Rowan wasn’t there. He never had been.
Mal breathed through his nose. Blades of grass shed puffs of smoke around his feet where the embers of his temper had fallen. He stamped out the tiny fires, angrily collected his spade, and returned to his digging. Sorting stones from soil proved to be more time consuming than he’d planned. He paused occasionally to rest, leaning on the handle of his spade. In the darkness behind his eyelids a constellation of life sprang up. Lately he could not sleep for the brilliance in his head. In his very worst moments, he itched to quench each spirit, one at a time until he was alone and in peace.
The lip of his spade caught on something that was not dirt or rock, rousing him from a vivid daydream of tromping idly along a muddy water course, searching for arrowroot to the busy background of laughter and clashing sword blades. But he did not belong there; that was Avani’s undertaking and she’d made it abundantly clear she wanted no part of him.
Mal dropped onto his hands and knees to better see what he had uncovered. A flap of old burlap, soil encrusted, disintegrating in patches. He worked his fingers in the dirt around it, trying to shift it loose. But the burlap was only a small square of a larger piece and no amount of gentle tugging would pry the whole free. He stripped off his tunic and lay bare chested in the dirt, digging now with his hands. Temple spells wreathing the lich yard kept the dead at bay, but Mal didn’t need a spirit standing at his shoulder to tell him what he’d discovered. As he excavated more soil, he could feel the shift of intimate shapes inside the burlap: human bones.
When it came free it came all at once, falling into Mal’s arms. Grunting, he hauled burlap onto the grass. Dirt and clumps of sod collapsed into the hole to fill the space left behind. Mal dusted soil from his fingers without much success as he considered his prize.
If the temple had spent time and effort to bind spells to the walls and to the obelisk for the sake of keeping executed magi safely entombed, they’d not put the same effort into interring necromantic remains. It was a large bag, heavy, and when Mal cut away the knots securing the top end, he discovered it was filled almost to bursting with a gruesome miscellany of bones.
Mal reached into the bag. He’d begun to think of them as his lost brothers and sisters, these anonymous magi. They’d shared his abilities, and likely shared similar joys and trials. They’d given their hearts to Wil
liam’s throne—up to a point. Possibly they’d been true to their obligation until the very end, possibly they’d been punished despite the depths of their loyalty. He was beginning to recognize intricacies he’d never considered as a younger man. For most of his life he’d been too bullheaded to see past the headiness of his office to darker implications. Self-importance had ruined his marriage and cost him his first love. He fully expected audacity would send him soon to join her in death.
There were three skulls in the bag amongst the bones. He set them side by side on the grass before dipping back into the collection. The bones were clean, cold, and smooth. The topmost layer showed no visible signs of charring. The smallest of the skulls was staved in at the top, by sword point or by halberd. That death at least would have been instantaneous.
Mal didn’t believe in any god, but he crossed each skull for the sake of respect before placing them one at a time into his pail. He added a handful of phalanges and vertebra for good measure before covering the pail with a scrap of cloth. Then he began the process of reburying the burlap bag. With luck, no one would ever notice his thievery.
When Mal strode down the slope onto Holder’s property, Baldebert was perched on the paddock fence, nose buried in the pages of a slim, silver-bound book. At the sound of his approach Baldebert shut the volume on one finger, marking his place. The sapphire-and-bone brooch glinted on his shirt.
Mal looked pointedly from Roue’s admiral to the closed barn door. From behind the building came the clang of hammer on anvil: Baldebert’s man hard work over Holder’s forge.
“I don’t like to be alone with it,” said Baldebert, forestalling Mal’s complaint. “It exudes dread and I believe it would like to tear me quite in half.”
“I assure you, it has no inclination one way or another.” Sighing, Mal set down his pail and spade. “It’s spelled to respond to my commands. It has no free will, no more than sword or cannon.”
Baldebert pursed his lips. “It moved. While I was working, it turned its head to watch me. It lashes its tail. If I accidentally venture too close my guts turn to water and my heart near stops in terror. It’s as tall as the hayloft and covered in spikes and I know it would quite like to tear me in half.” He tucked the book under his arm and hopped off the fence. “Success?”
“In a manner of speaking.” He was not sure the three ghosts who had followed him from the lich yard would agree. Two women and an elderly man, the magi had materialized as soon as he’d stepped out of the circle of temple magic. They’d followed him back through the city and out along the King’s Highway without speaking. They stood silently now, waiting, blue gazes cast in the direction of their bones in his pail.
Baldebert executed a neat bow from the waist. “Then, lead on,” he said. “I’ll trust you to keep that thing from my throat.”
There were new wards set about the barn’s perimeter, tuned to Mal and to Baldebert and to Baldebert’s ironmonger, but no other. They flashed silver as Mal and Baldebert passed through, then sparked savagely at the magi, pushing the spirits back. One of the women flinched away, covering her ghostly face with one arm. It was the first sign Mal had that the disinterred dead were aware.
He disengaged the wards. Baldebert slid the barn door open. Cogs in the frame squeaked. Inside the barn, shadows shifted. Mal conjured mage-light, sent it spinning up above the rafters. He slipped inside the building. Baldebert followed. The dead magi came after.
Lane’s Automata waited, motionless, beneath the hay loft. It appeared no more alive than it had before he had kindled it in the Bone Cave, but Mal knew better. It had come at his command across the country in the night, breaking a hole in the back of the cave, earth and stone and theist spell of no consequence. It had loped across fallow fields to Holder’s barn, leaving deep furrows behind wherever metal talons touched soil. He’d rejoiced to see it run, for the immense power of working pistons and wheels, and for sheer disbelief. He’d dealt in the realm of death for so long, he’d never imagined the thrill of conjuring life.
“Three skulls,” Baldebert said, plucking the covering off Mal’s pail. “That’s but half of what we need, if we’re to disregard the bones Holder collected.”
Mal ground his teeth. In the corner the Automata lashed its iron tail. Both Mal and Baldebert pretended not to notice.
“Three for now,” Mal said briefly. “More later. First I need to know if I’m going about it right. That fiend there required a coterie of children to wake. We cannot go around digging up whole boneyards in one swoop. Eventually someone is bound to take notice.”
Together they had cleaned Holder’s work table of detritus, sorting usable pieces of machinery from rubbish. The old tools lived now outside near the forge. There was space again on the long table to work, to puzzle out the ways and means of a clockwork beast. Baldebert’s man was a capable blacksmith, blissfully ignorant of flatland history and the walking machines’ deadly reputation, but he’d learned his trade with an eye toward shipboard maintenance. With Holder gone there were none left who knew exactly how to build the walking machines. Mal and Baldebert were relying on luck more than either liked to admit.
Mal placed the stolen skulls gently on a clear space at the center of the table. Upending his pail, he emptied the rest of the bones into a shallow pile nearby.
“It didn’t occur to me until just last night that the most potent bones in the royal cemetery,” he explained, “are buried in the lich yard. Lane and Holder were correct in thinking the ferric soldiers need a powerful magic to walk, but they went looking in the wrong direction. The iron in the framework countervails any benefit sidhe bones may retain.” He picked up the damaged skull, turned it over in his hands. The three dead magi watched intently. “The straw men, the improved mannequins Faolan encountered in the red woods—those Holder and Brother Paul could stir to life, and even that magic, I suspect, was temporary. True Automata are the sole province of the magi, built purposefully of iron to rid the flatlands of barrowmen.”
“That part, at least, worked as planned,” commented Baldebert, eyeing the hole in the skull. “It was only later things got out of hand, if I’m to understand your histories.”
Mal lifted the skull, gazed into its empty sockets. “Not this time,” he said. “Then, magi were common enough to seem a threat. Now there are but two of us. Even with the Automata, we are a fraction of what we once were.”
“Of late I find that reassuring,” Baldebert confessed, touching the ivory manacles always on his belt. He nodded at the bones. “Potent spirits, then. And possibly very angry. Death by fire or noose was unlikely to improve what good temper they may have sustained amidst mass extermination.” He picked up a phalange, restlessly set it back on the work table. “But do you think these will do?”
“Oh, aye,” Mal answered, smirking not at Baldebert but at the three silent spirts. “I suspect these will do perfectly. Shall we see?” He passed the damaged skull to Baldebert. The barn’s rear door was cracked open just wide enough for the ironmonger to move in and out with his work. Lane’s Automata turned its head to watch as Mal and Baldebert passed. Its rust-stained chest, a welter of chain, cogs, and mismatched armor, rose and fell with a sound to rival the bellows beyond the barn door. Baldebert winced away.
As far as Mal could tell, the magi, drifting after, paid it no mind at all.
The blacksmith paused over his anvil to greet Baldebert. He was a brawny man, grizzled and weathered, his eyes blue as the sea. Mal did not remember him from shipboard but it was obvious from the way he refused to look in Mal’s direction that he had witnessed the misfortune on The Cutlass Wind. The sailor quenched his hammer and tongs in a nearby bucket of water set aside for the purpose and arched a brow at Baldebert’s burden.
“Ready to give it a try, are we, Captain?” he inquired doubtfully.
The ground behind the barn was strewn with segments of Automata carried from Holder’s storage into the open for easier perusal. The smith, made orderly by a career spent on de
ck, had sorted recognizable pieces into quadrants on the ground around his forge: arms made of fragmented pauldrons, vambraces, and gauntlets. Fabricated cuirass torsos and overlong, stilt-like legs forged from pieces of delicately engraved greaves and thick iron chain. Clawed metal feet ten times as large as a man’s own. Long, articulated appendages meant to be tail or tentacle. And, displayed on the fence posts of an empty pen, four polished helms of the barbute style, eye slits vacant.
Mal retrieved the skull from Baldebert. The ironmonger snatched up his bucket and poured water over his forge, extinguishing flames.
“If you don’t mind, Captain,” he said. “I’ll just be taking a break while you endeavor.” At Baldebert’s nod he hurried off, slipping through Mal’s rear wards and back up the hill away from the barn.
“Can’t say I blame him.” Baldebert squinted at a small mountain of long, deadly looking spikes, resigned. “I’ve read Brother Lino’s journals front to back more times than I’d like to count and I still don’t know how you intend to manage it. Shouldn’t we . . . erect some sort of chassis before you begin?”
“Nay.” The ghostly magi had wandered as a group between the blacksmith’s neat piles and now lingered near the empty paddock, whispering amongst themselves. One of the women walked translucent fingers over a barbute, spectral eyes flashing blue. All at once Mal knew it was her broken cranium he held in his hands, and that his success was assured.
“Nay,” he repeated, winking at Baldebert. Expectation was as intoxicating as good red wine. “You haven’t looked closely at Lane’s monster.”
“I haven’t,” Baldebert agreed. “I can’t get near it without wanting to weep and tear my hair. You don’t seem to suffer the same challenge.”
Mal’s grin turned smug. “The Automata don’t frighten me. The founding pieces of that skeleton are not forged together,” he explained. “The head, the limbs, the fingers, the tail. Those are very loosely attached to the torso by chain and cog, aye. Enough to hold together while standing. The living body is a flexible and delicate miracle, Baldebert. No machine can obtain that balance of its own accord.” He tapped his fingers on the skull. “It’s the magic that keeps it together, allows it movement. Holder and Lane started with sparring dummies, man-sized dolls sewn together for the purpose of training young lads and lasses to recognize the enemy and his physical weaknesses. And mayhap, like a doll, Holder’s predecessors loosely pieced together each ferric soldier to a certain specification. But I suspect not. I suspect there was more imagination involved in each creation.”