The Barbed Coil

by J. V. Jones

  Izgard swallowed the wine. He did not take another sip. He placed the goblet upon the desk, then took the necessary strides toward the door. Other matters needed his attention. He had been rough with Ederius earlier, and it had been preying on his mind ever since. The scribe was everything to him. Everything. He was the only man in Garizon Izgard trusted to hold the Coil. Yet whenever they were together Izgard found himself losing control and lashing out.

  Mind set on making amends, Izgard burst into the scriptorium. Two figures froze at his entrance: Ederius, sitting at his scribing desk, leaning back in his chair, knife and quill resting motionless atop the illumination set before him; and Angeline, standing at his back, pretty-painted fingernails resting upon the coarse brown wool at his left shoulder. The Barbed Coil rested on a plinth behind them. Gold it was, but the shadow it cast matched the color of blood.

  Both Ederius and Angeline stared wide-eyed at Izgard for an instant and then quickly sprang apart.

  “Izgard,” breathed Angeline in her high little-girl’s voice. “Poor Ederius’ shoulder was aching so. He has been working so hard and his muscles began to cramp, and the bone is badly broken—”

  “Ssh,” hissed Izgard.

  Angeline’s mouth closed. Her right hand fluttered by her side. Her left hand sidled up to the desk and silently slid a piece of parchment away.

  Izgard was beside her in an instant, fingers gripping her wrist. “Give me that.”

  Angeline’s face crumpled. Her blue eyes began to tear. “It’s mine. I won’t show it.”

  Furious, Izgard hit her with a half-closed fist. Her neck snapped back. She went sprawling sideways, falling onto the bare stone floor.

  Ederius took a sharp breath.

  Izgard raised his hand for a second strike. Catching himself at the last moment, he snatched the sheet from Angeline’s hand instead. Crushing the parchment in his fist, he worked to control his rage. Minutes passed before it left him. No one moved or spoke.

  Abruptly, Izgard’s vision sharpened and cleared. The blood pumping through his temples slowed. Uncurling his fist, he smoothed out the sheet of parchment. It was a line drawing of a dog. All its limbs had been filled in with different colors, and his head and tail shone out in gold. A child’s coloring page.

  “Sire,” Ederius said softly, “I just drew a small fancy to amuse the queen. Her Highness enjoys painting along with me.”

  Izgard nodded absently. He knelt by his wife and offered her his hand. “Come, my love,” he said in his most gentle voice. “Take my hand. Let me help you up.”

  Angeline didn’t move. A fat bead of blood welled up on her lip. Her gaze darted to Ederius.

  Moving his hand upward, Izgard wiped the blood from his wife’s mouth. As his knuckle grazed across her lips, Izgard felt something deep within his chest turn. Angeline was trembling; her small fingers clutched at the fabric of her dress. What had possessed him to hit her? She had only been comforting Ederius, that was all. Confused by the sudden switch of his emotions, Izgard pulled his hand away. “Go now, Angeline,” he said, straightening to his full height. “I would talk to my scribe alone.”

  Angeline knew enough about his voice and moods to recognize those times it was best to do as she was told. She stood, brushed down her dress, and walked out of the room, closing the door behind her as gently as a scolded child.

  Izgard turned his attention to Ederius. The scribe’s left shoulder was a bulky, bandaged lump beneath his robe. Izgard wanted to touch and soothe it. Instead he said, “I never want to see you and my wife alone again. Is that clear?”

  “But, sire, the queen is like a child to me, a daughter. I would never—”

  Izgard cracked a fist onto Ederius’ desk. Papers jumped, glazed pots chinked. A jug tippled over, spilling water onto Ederius’ latest illumination. “I said is that clear?”

  Ederius hung his head. Water dripped from the desk onto his lap. “Perfectly, sire.”

  “Good.” Izgard nodded. The effort of holding himself back had left him drained. Now his anger had cleared, he realized that Angeline and the scribe were involved in nothing unseemly. Angeline had doubtless seen the scribe’s work and wanted to try it for herself. The old scribe, anxious to please his queen, had probably gone out of his way to amuse her, and Angeline was always so grateful whenever anyone showed her kindness. Here in Sern Fortress she was isolated from her friends, and with both her father and brother now dead, she had no family to call her own.

  An eternal little girl, Angeline had doted on her dear, drunken brother and her pockmarked papa. Izgard could still recall the first time he had ever set eyes on her. She was kneeling at her father’s feet, warming them in her hands to improve his circulation. A vision of daughterly devotion. During the meeting with her father, Izgard could hardly take his eyes off her. She was the ideal Garizon beauty: pale, full hipped, and fresh faced. When she spoke she revealed yet another charm: her sweet, uncultured nature.

  Izgard shook his thoughts away. Angeline was a fool. She meant less and less to him as the days went by. War and the Coil were all that mattered now.

  Gaze circling the scriptorium, Izgard sought out his crown. The Barbed Coil shone gold in the candlelight. Hammer welded at white heat like a greatsword, fine rods of platinum, iron, and latten had been twisted into the molten gold. Once forged into a single billet, the cooling metal had been folded in upon itself a thousand times, then extruded to form a single strand of incalculable length before being beaten into a coil to fit a man. The gold looked like no other metal Izgard had ever seen. Its color and texture changed by the moment. And although it had once been tested and found to be nine-tenths gold, it was harder than the finest fighting steel.

  Worked in such a way that it reflected more of itself than its surroundings, the Barbed Coil seemed to glow with a private, inner light. Each strand of gold had been etched with its own set of designs. Cut deep to reveal the dark, multilayered interior of the metal, subtle patterns and markings chased their way across the gold. Recently Ederius had taken to recreating the patterns and markings in his illuminations. It was how he made the harras more than men.

  Turning to Ederius, Izgard said, “Let us consider the matter of my wife behind us. Tell me, have your sketchings been successful tonight?” As he spoke, Izgard reached out and stroked Ederius’ thinning gray hair. He liked to touch those who were close to him.

  Ederius tried hard not to flinch. “I have failed you, sire. Lord Ravis has escaped us again.”

  Izgard shook his head sadly. There was nothing for Ederius to be afraid of. Spying a lock of hair out of place on the scribe’s temple, he smoothed it back. “What happened this time?”

  A rivulet of sweat spilled from the hairline above Ederius’ ear. “I’m not sure. There were six men in all—a pair waiting in the house and a pair apiece keeping watch on either end of the bridge. As you instructed, no one took action until Lord Ravis tried to enter the house.” Ederius’ voice rose higher as he spoke. “From what I can tell, Lord Ravis overcame the two harras in the house and then evaded the others by jumping into the river.”

  “And the remaining harras?” Izgard ran a finger along the scribe’s cheekbone. “Did they not pursue him into the river?”

  Ederius’ nod was quick in coming. “Yes, sire. Two of the harras jumped in after him, but it was very dark at water level, and no one could be sure if they had swum to the east bank or the west, or followed the river downstream.”

  “They?” Izgard’s finger moved across Ederius’ brow to the bridge of his nose.

  “Lord Ravis had a lady with him at the time.”

  “A lady.” Izgard spat out the word. He twisted away from Ederius and stalked toward the crown. Ederius let out a tiny, almost imperceptible sigh of relief behind his back. Izgard heard it nonetheless. Born with one sense short of five, he took pains to ensure that the remaining four stretched themselves to fill the void. Izgard had the hearing of a creature of the dark.

  Reaching out to touch t
he threads of the Barbed Coil, he said, “I don’t think any woman who chose to be with Ravis of Burano would dare call herself a lady. A whore, certainly; a deluded fool, perhaps; maybe even an unwilling victim dragged away against her will.” Aware of where his thoughts were leading him, and reluctant to pursue further, Izgard worked to change the course of his words. “I want Ravis of Burano dead. I will order more harras to Bay’Zell, and I want you to ensure they do their job well and swiftly.” He ran his thumb over a cluster of golden barbs. He hadn’t changed the subject at all, just honed it to a single deadly point.

  In his anger, Izgard pressed his open palm against the crown. He closed his eyes as the barbs bit into his flesh. The pain was as pure and piercing as a Garizon prayer, and Izgard felt stronger for having suffered it. Straight away, his mind refocused on what was important: winning the coming war.

  He turned his attention back to Ederius. Moving close to the scribe’s side, Izgard set the fallen water jug back on its base. The pattern beneath was ruined; various colored inks had run into one, and the wet stain that remained was the color of blood.

  Touching Ederius’ broken shoulder as tenderly as Angeline had before him, Izgard said, “Come, my old friend, you must sleep. You have had a long, hard night, and now it is time to rest. I need you to be here at daybreak. A new pattern must be started before the battle at dawn.”

  The scribe patted Izgard’s hand gently. “Yes, sire, you are right. I must rest.”

  Izgard’s smile was gentle as he helped Ederius’ out of his chair. He loved the old scribe very much.

  N I N E

  M ercury-rich vermilion ink slashed across the page, a thousand times more deadly than the sum of its poisonous parts. Honeyed gold spiraled behind it, a gilded viper at its heels. Red lead pinpoints blistered onto the parchment like venom from a snake. White lead would come later: red’s lethal sister was best kept to last.

  A complex mixture of folium purple and copper blue came next. If mercury vermilion formed the arteries, then copper folium formed the veins. Skeins of amethyst ink pumped from the scribe’s brush, forming a varicose of lines. Yellow arsenic followed. Thickly mixed, it wept onto the page like pus suppurating from a wound. Through it all—through the yellow and blue and purple and red—the gold ink coiled like the serpent it was. Fat-bodied curves entwined scarlet vessels, constricting the flow of pigment to the upper left quarter of the page. Made from powdered gold, honey, and glair, the gold ink cut through all the lines in its path like an assassin slitting throats.

  The scribe felt each deadly blow. He felt them in his temples and in the slowly mending bone at his collar and the muscles surrounding his heart. His eyes ached, his robe was damp with sweat, yet although his upper arm cramped with the strain of steadying his grip, his fingers never shook.

  No one, not even an assassin, needed a steadier hand than a scribe.

  The scribe didn’t waste his energy on a smile, though he did let his bitterness work its way onto the parchment, where he could be sure it would do nothing but good.

  He was an assassin. A deft hand, a clever eye, and a knowledge of poisonous substances: the two were surely one and the same. Here, in his grip and lying flat under his palms, were his weapons and poisons of choice: brush, parchment, pigment. His victims lay twenty leagues to the west, and as in all expert assassinations, they didn’t suspect a thing. Seeing only a troop of armed men—not enough to be named a company, nor sufficient to be perceived as a threat—they let the men approach. “Look, they aren’t heavily armed,” they said. “They surely mean us no harm.”

  Ederius saw through the eyes of the creatures he had created from men: his pulse beat with their pulse, he felt what they felt. And even though he had created the raw need to kill within them, its sheer ferocity chilled him to the bone. They smelled their victims’ breath like a hungry man smelled a meal. His tongue wetted with theirs, and he was powerless to stop it.

  Briefly Ederius glanced up from his illumination. The Barbed Coil rested on a plinth before him, the gold weaving a secret maze for his eyes alone. The frame of light and shadow burned an image on his retina like the sun. When he looked down at the parchment, he saw the design he was working upon through the filter of the crown. The two images fit together like the pieces of a puzzle, and suddenly and irrefutably Ederius knew what he must do.

  The brush became an extra finger and the pigments gushed from it like blood from a wound. Colors he mixed were deeper than any he’d mixed before. The brushstrokes he made were both swift and audacious, executed with the careless grace of a devil and the accuracy of a marksman taking aim.

  The men approached their victims—Rhaize villagers in the border town of Chalce—blades warm against their thighs, vision showing all that moved, teeth unfamiliar shapes in their mouths. Minds were sharp, senses keen, and, as the illumination began to shift toward its final form, a feeling of unity swept through the group. Before the Barbed Coil they had been separate beings; now they acted and thought as one.

  Ederius was a master magician, orchestrating his show with a cool hand, a swift eye, and an unshakable vision of all he could achieve. Scarlet ink sprayed the page as the men fell on the villagers. The scribe heard their cries, saw their horror at the breadth of savagery unleashed, and, without as much as a blink of an eye, incorporated the terror within the page. It was binder for the ink.

  “So few,” he heard one young man whisper. “Who would have thought so few could bring such—”

  A spearhead of gold cut through a dark vein of purple, and the man neither said, did, nor thought anything more. Ederius dropped dots of red lead around the severed edge for no other reason than it felt the right thing to do. Brushstrokes followed knife strokes, knotwork became strategies, and spirals became movements in the drama to the west. The Barbed Coil was a ghost on the page. A terrible, bloodthirsty muse.

  Nine men there were. Nine harras hand-picked by Izgard for their weapon skills and intelligence, and somehow the illumination forming on the scribe’s desk brought all their training together, creating a whole being from the sum of their nine parts.

  Ederius wanted more. He could control twenty, thirty, a hundred men. A company, a battalion, an army could be his! He knew everything they knew, their strengths were his strengths, and their weaknesses sank to the bottom like pigment settling in ink.

  Line after line, the scribe carved upon the page. Original hardpoint guidelines, so painstakingly measured and worked out earlier, were ignored. Rules of symmetry, mirroring, and repetition fell away. Nothing was important, only reproducing his vision of the Coil. As villager after villager was slain, new designs emerged from the flood of colors bleeding over the parchment. Complex, beautiful, fascinating: they challenged the mind and quickened the heart and sent a white-hot excitement to the core.

  Still the carnage continued. No longer any men left to slay, the harras turned on the women and children: spines snapped, jaws broke, bladders emptied. Ederius used each cry of terror and plea for mercy as fuel for his great feat of scribing. He fed off their fear. When finally there were no more people to kill, the harras turned their fury on the animals. Dogs, hens, pigs, calves: anything that moved was hacked until it moved no more.

  Nine men there were. Nine lightly armed men. Yet they massacred a village of over ten times their number. And they did it in less than an hour.

  When finally there was nothing more to kill and messages were sent to the army waiting on the far side of the pass, Ederius felt himself beginning to fail. With hands stained red and gold, he made the final penstrokes, following the imagined lines to their ultimate, eloquent end. He was close to losing the harras. He was even closer to losing himself. A feeling of well-being washed over him. He had created a magnificent design. The Barbed Coil held a world full of secrets, and it had chosen to let him glimpse one for a while.

  Ederius felt his eyes closing. His brush fell from his grip and rolled from the desk onto the floor. If it made a sound when it landed, the scribe
never heard it.

  He awoke. Blinking, he ran a hand over the edge of the page. It was a reflex reaction of all scribes: How dry is the paint? How long have I slept? The paint was sticky, almost dry. An hour and a half, perhaps two, had passed.

  Ederius wiped his old eyes, worked the cramp from his right arm, rubbed his aching collarbone, and then looked down at the illumination he had scribed.

  A sharp pain coursed though his heart. Random bands and splashes of color met his eye. He searched and searched but could perceive no design. There was none. It was pure chaos.

  Seeing it for what it was, Ederius hung his head low and wept.

  “Emith! Emith! Come quickly and turn my chair. The young lady is beginning to stir.”

  Tessa opened her eyes. She was looking at a rafter hung with herbs. A second rafter bristled with bacon joints, and a third was agleam with copper pots. Smells, good ones, sailed up her nose along with heat, steam, and smoke. Rising, Tessa saw that she was in a large firelit kitchen, cluttered with pans, teapots, bowls, and odd wooden devices she couldn’t begin to name, dominated by a large figure of a woman sitting on an oak-framed chair facing toward the fire.

  The woman, who had her back to Tessa, turned her head and nodded. “Morning, my dear. Emith will be here in a minute, then I can take a proper look at you.”

  Tessa swung her feet onto the floor. She had been sleeping on a wooden bench softened by a mattress filled with straw. Blankets smelling of things pickled and preserved slid down over her knees, and a nightgown the color of hazelnuts brushed against the floor. Her muscles felt stiff, her feet were aching, and her head felt decidedly heavy.

  “Miss,” called Emith from the doorway, “I’ll just wait here until you’re decent.”

  Tessa spun around. Emith was staring intently at the door frame. Glancing down at her nightgown, Tessa could only smile. Decent? She couldn’t remember the last time she had worn anything as decent as this: the sleeves fell to her wrists, the hemline covered her toes, and the neckline was high enough for strangling. And judging from the slight chafing she felt directly under her chin, it may well have started out even higher.