Armed in Her Fashion

by Kate Heartfield

  Three chimeras went running past them. They heard one of them shouting in French, wondering why all the revenants were leaving at once.

  “There must have been orders,” one of them said.

  “There were no orders,” said Monoceros. Margriet saw him, standing just opposite them. Claude tensed beside her. “All the orders come through me.”

  “Then what? What made them leave?”

  “I don’t know,” said Monoceros. “Where’s Chaerephon? Still sleeping?”

  “He left with them.”

  “With the revenants? Where has he taken them? Come on. You stay at the mouth, Oplo and Mantis, and if they come back, one of you come and tell me. I’ll be in the Chatelaine’s chambers.”

  Monoceros and the two with him ran down the throat. Claude pulled them out and whispered, “Don’t sneak. Walk like you’re angry. Walk like they were walking.”

  The passages of the beast opened into a chamber and there were chimeras gathered there, talking among themselves. There were fires bursting up now and then from the floor like guttering candles.

  The chimeras looked up when the women came in but no one seemed to take much notice. The idea that these cobbled together bits of metal and fur could make them pass for ordinary here made Margriet want to laugh; she could not think of the last thing that had made her want to laugh. Perhaps it was the Plague, eroding her mind.

  “This is the smithy,” Claude whispered.

  They strode through to the other side, into another corridor.

  They kept walking until Claude told them to stop, hissing that here was the entrance to the Chatelaine’s chambers in time to see Monoceros go in, alone. Where the other two had gone they did not know.

  “The Chatelaine will be leaving, no doubt,” Claude said as they crouched and watched the entrance. “She’ll want to know where they have gone. She’ll go after Chaerephon herself, perhaps.”

  But as they waited they heard behind them the mouth of Hell opening again.

  “If it’s opening without the Chatelaine working the bridle, that must be the revenants returning,” Claude said. “The beast always takes them back. God’s nails. We’ve lost. They’ll tell her.”

  Margriet pulled her around and looked into her face.

  “I’m trying something. As soon as you see the Chatelaine leave her chambers, as soon as she is well gone, you get the chest and get out of here. And keep Beatrix safe, or I’ll haunt you when I’m dead.”

  “Don’t be a fool,” said Claude.

  But Margriet was already creeping away from them. She thought of Beatrix’s sweet face, the lovely rosebud mouth that had sucked at her breast, the round blue eyes. She was a good girl and she would get herself a proper husband and a baby. She would be fine.

  Margriet walked as quickly as she could back toward the large chamber where the smiths were hammering at their forges. She winced. No matter where she went, someone was hammering. The furnaces blew and she felt for a moment like what she was: a small creature inside the bellows belly of a great beast.

  She walked to the middle of the room and pulled off her goggle-helm.

  “Call the Chatelaine!” she screamed. “Call the hellkite! Tell her Margriet de Vos has come to be transformed!”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Claude heard Margriet scream. Gertrude darted forward but Claude pushed her back, despite the fact that he wanted to run down the hall himself. But there was no point in trying to save the dying.

  “Walk,” he muttered, and he and Gertrude walked deeper into the beast, past the Chatelaine’s door. As they walked he heard the Chatelaine’s voice, behind them, giving orders to someone.

  “Go to the mouth and see what Chaerephon is about, and bring him back to me. Bring me his head if he answers back anything but ‘yes, Monoceros.’”

  Monoceros was there, then, behind them. Claude’s face flushed. Would he recognize him from behind? Claude kept walking away. They must look like two chimeras on their way somewhere. They must keep up that pretense.

  At last after they had heard nothing for several long moments he stopped, and put his hands out to Gertrude, and looked behind.

  Too soon; he had miscalculated. There was the back of the Chatelaine, her dress sweeping behind, and a step or two behind, Monoceros, glancing back over his enormous bare shoulder.

  Monoceros looked back at Claude, and knew him for who he was.

  Claude was sure of it. The golden eyes widened and the pupils within narrowed, and Monoceros stood taller for a moment, like a beast ready to spring.

  Claude’s right arm shuddered with instinct but it was no good to him so he reached his left over to his dagger.

  And then the lids dropped a little over those eyes, and Monoceros’s head drooped and he shook his head a little. His expression reminded Claude of the time a general had told the crossbowmen to hold their fire, and one had not heard, and had shot and alerted the enemy to their position. Monoceros looked as if he were mourning someone yet alive.

  Without looking at him again, Monoceros turned and walked away, following behind the Chatelaine.

  It all happened while Gertrude was still turning; she did not see.

  “All clear?” Gertrude whispered.

  Were they? Would Monoceros betray them? Was he playing some game? For now Claude could only hope that he would not give them away.

  Claude did not answer but crept forward towards the door of the Chatelaine’s chambers. He had been inside them once before. It seemed a lifetime ago; he was different now. Desperate. Let me have desperate men, Janos had said, once. Desperate men can be trusted. He pulled his knife out. The last time he was here, there had been a porter in the antechamber. If the forged mace-key were in those chambers, there would no doubt be a porter there now, perhaps more than one.

  But the main thing he was worried about was the lock. He made a fist of his weak right hand, and winced in pain.

  The interior doors of hell all opened to one key only, and it was on the Chatelaine’s arm. It was certain that she had locked her own chamber, if the treasure were inside. But Claude hoped for only one thing, that the locked door was on the inside of the antechamber, after the guards, where he could pick the lock in peace—having first dispatched the guards.

  He was not so lucky.

  The outside door had a great lock on it, a shining scar set into the flesh of the beast. It matched the pattern of the flanges, like a cruel reminder of what Claude did not have.

  He pulled Gertrude toward him and whispered in her ear.

  “I’ve got to get that door open but I can’t make a sound. You stand here and cough or something if someone comes.”

  Gertrude nodded like a frightened coney. It was strange to see her quiet, for once.

  Claude crept to the door and put his withered right hand out, felt the flesh of the beast meet his own flesh. Between them there should have been a key, and he felt the lack of it, and the beast felt the lack of it, too. A shudder went through the skin of the door.

  “Shh,” Claude said softly.

  He moved his fingers against the scar, feeling the polished uneven surface against the skin of his fingertips. Pain lanced through each of his fingers. He sheathed his dagger, gritted his teeth and used his left hand to prop up his right arm, under the elbow. He could feel the scar tissue shifting, closing in on itself, the keyholes tightening against his efforts. He gritted his teeth so as not to swear.

  It wasn’t working. The beast knew what he was doing, and was working against him. And what would it do if he kept at it? Bellow? Vomit him out? Claude had never been quite sure whose side Hell was on, and this seemed like the worst possible way to find out.

  Gertrude came to his side.

  “Not working?” she whispered, not quietly enough.

  “You’re supposed to be on watch,” he said.

&nb
sp; “Can’t we cut our way through or something? It’s not like wood or stone, is it?”

  Bloodthirsty woman.

  “Not without letting the guard on the other side know we’re here.”

  Gertrude looked at him.

  “There’s a guard on the other side?”

  He nodded.

  “Then why not let him open the door?”

  Claude shook his head. He wanted a quick, silent throat-cutting in the antechamber, not a fight out here in the hall that would call all the chimeras to them.

  He concentrated again on the lock but it was even worse with Gertrude looking over his shoulder. Hadn’t he told her to keep watch? He should have come on his own. He should never have made common cause with these women.

  Gertrude coughed.

  The lock moved and the door started to swing open.

  “Speak,” came a voice in French. “Friend or foe?”

  Claude’s dagger was already in his left hand and he thrust it up into the place where he expected the throat to be, but it was a Mantis-Man, and the throat was higher than Claude’s head. So instead of shutting up the guard, it made a sound like a great chittering insect as black blood bubbled out of the wound.

  “God’s nails,” Claude muttered, but Gertrude was down on the ground, pulling the legs of the Mantis-man. The Mantis-man fell backwards, and Claude pounced on its narrow green chest and felt something chitinous snap beneath his weight. A poor choice of guard. The Chatelaine should have left someone like Monoceros behind; but she had probably thought the danger was above, not below. And Margriet now was doubtless caught, and soon they would be bringing her down, deeper, for questioning.

  The Mantis-man was struggling; its razor pincers snapped. Claude slit the Mantis-man’s throat and rolled off him, through the door, Gertrude crawling behind him.

  Margriet was in shackles by the time the Chatelaine and her horned lackey came through the door of the smithy. Margriet stood tall, her blood pounding, her hands shaking.

  She had a terrible idea. It had taken hold of her, been building in her since—when? Since Beatrix’s first vision, or since the day Jacquemine told her about the hellfire that destroyed the Smedenpoort? Or perhaps since the day she saw the gonners blow themselves and their yappy dog to pieces?

  The Chatelaine came to her and walked around her sniffing, as Margriet were some vermin brought in by her hounds.

  “Explain, and do it quickly,” she said. “If I lose patience you lose your viscera.”

  “I am offering you my service,” Margriet said. “I would like to become a chimera.”

  The Chatelaine came closer, spoke more quietly.

  “And why would you do that?”

  “Because I am destitute, thanks to you,” she answered, hewing as close to the truth as she could, knowing she was a rotten liar. “Because I do not wish to be a burden on my daughter, and because I would go sour in a convent.”

  “You’re sour now,” the Chatelaine muttered, walking around her. “And why this performance? Can you explain, then, why my revenants ran out of here like rats fleeing a ship?”

  “I did not know the best way to knock on your front door. I was afraid I would be killed outright by one of your guards. So my dear daughter called the revenants, to give me a chance to get in, and get your attention and make my case.”

  “Hmm,” said the Chatelaine again. “A strange way to earn my trust.”

  “I don’t want your trust,” Margriet snapped. “I want you to make me into a weapon.”

  “Truly? Well now, and what sort of weapon would you be?”

  “Something with power. Something like the thunder weapons I saw at the walls of Bruges.”

  Margriet thought of the visions Beatrix had, the wars she had seen that had not yet come to pass. If Margriet could succeed, perhaps those infernal wars never would happen. Perhaps that gift she could give her daughter, a life with no more of those horrible visions in it.

  The Chatelaine drew away from her, frowning.

  “But more powerful,” said Margriet. “I don’t want to just make a sound like a little fart and throw some smoke. If I’m to be a weapon, make all of me a weapon. Make it count.”

  “You’ve got a mouth on you,” said the Chatelaine with a cruel smile. “I could make the thunder come out of your mouth. I could make a furnace of your belly. I could make you a Hellbeast on wheels. Would that suit you?”

  “It would,” said Margriet, with her stomach lurching and her skin cold.

  The second door was locked, too. And this time there would be no one on the other side of it. Or so Claude hoped. He and Gertrude pulled the Mantis-man’s body into the small antechamber and stood there in the darkness, lit only by the red flesh of the Hellbeast, by the fiery blood that coursed through its body. How old was it? Claude would have liked to speak to it—or to speak to the Chatelaine’s husband, who some said was still alive, and kept here in the deepest oubliette. He could free him—that would be a fine revenge.

  But that was not why he was here.

  He put his sore right hand to the scar again. Again the keyholes shrank and squirmed.

  “God’s bodkin,” said Claude, and drew his dagger.

  “Good,” said Gertrude. “Do something, and quick!”

  But rather than cut the flesh, and risk the Beast crying out of God knows what, Claude wanted to force the lock, the way he had in the camp. He wrapped the fingers of his weak hand around the knife hilt, and held them in his strong hand, and thrust the knife in. A few twists and the beast groaned. Blood poured out from the scar. He had been right to worry that this would have alerted the Mantis-man; but now the Mantis-man was dead, and they would soon be caught if they stayed much longer.

  The door cracked and swung in.

  The Chatelaine’s private chamber was hung in tapestries that showed strange scenes, with no humans in them. Claude had had a chance to study them, before, when the Chatelaine had asked him what he wanted to be.

  “I want to be myself,” he had said, over and over, unwilling to be made into one of her lackeys, mistrusting any transformation she could give him.

  And in the end he had transformed himself, into something very like her.

  They strode in, not speaking, each of them looking in the corners for the chest.

  Into the next chamber, where the Chatelaine slept. Here it was more bare: a bed, a table with a book upon it.

  There beside the bed was a great chest.

  Claude used his knife again and cracked the lock. This one was much easier; it gave way willingly. An ordinary padlock, to hold the wealth a man had tried to keep from his wife and child. An easy thing to break, a pleasure to break.

  There was the sack, full of Willem’s goods. Still not distributed or melted down. But the mace-key was not inside.

  He stood, seething. Where had she hidden it? Was it possible she had destroyed it already?

  “We should take this and go,” said Gertrude.

  “It isn’t all there,” Claude answered.

  “They’ll find us.”

  Claude paced the room. “What would you do with something you wished did not exist?”

  “I’d throw it away.”

  “No, you foolish woman, not something you wished you didn’t have. Something that should not exist.”

  “I’d throw it away, and don’t call me foolish. I’d throw it somewhere no one could find it, like the sea. Or into a fire.”

  Claude whirled. There was no fireplace in this room, or any other room inside the Hellbeast. It was always warm in here. But then where could they find a fire?

  “The forges,” he said, despairing. “But she’d have to do it quietly, privately. She didn’t want anyone to know. Did she do it already?”

  “We must go now,” Gertrude urged.

  Claude picked up one side of
the sack and Gertrude the other, and they pulled it out of the strongbox and walked out, stepping over the Mantis-man’s body, not bothering now to close the doors. If anyone saw them now in the hall there would be no denying their purpose. No running, either. They would have to fight.

  But not without a search of the smithy furnace, if Claude could manage it.

  The hall was empty save a cloud of bats and a few scrappy revenants who ignored them.

  “They weren’t gone long,” Claude said.

  “What do you think happened to Beatrix?” Gertrude asked.

  Nothing good, Claude thought. Not for them to have come back so quickly. Or perhaps Beatrix had simply lost her nerve, and sent them all back. The most likely scenario, really. He said nothing to Gertrude, who seemed so fond of Beatrix. Let her think what she liked. Nothing Claude could say would make it any better or any worse.

  They paused as they came near the door of the smithy where there were crowds of people hanging at the edges. But everyone was looking inward, where a fire was raging and some victim was screaming. There were hoots of laughter. Margriet. It must be Margriet.

  Claude looked at Gertrude’s face and saw she had realized it, too. What could they do? She had asked them to get the chest to Beatrix. Although now Beatrix was very likely dead, and there was nothing in this sack Claude wanted, and Gertrude had wanted only to hurt the Chatelaine and would have a very hard time convincing herself she had.

  Claude shut his eyes for a moment to steel himself and saw only red, the glow of fire through flesh, his or Hell’s, it did not matter. Then he opened them and walked to one side, yanking Gertrude on the other side of the sack.

  “Wait here,” he told her. “And if any chimeras come, scream. And run. Run first then scream while you are running.”