by Mike Shel
“Yes,” she answered, her frank, lopsided smile intact. She dropped her blade and held up the hand to shake. “Sira Edjani, of the Blue Cathedral in Boudun.”
Both men ignored her proffered hand.
“Have you ever amputated a comrade’s leg on the battlefield?” Auric asked Belech.
“I’ve seen a medicus do it,” he answered, rubbing his forehead. “Maybe half a dozen times. Usually because of an infection long after a fight, or if the bone below a wound was shattered. It’s very unpleasant for all involved.”
“Nevertheless, it’s the only sensible option. We’re still at least eighteen miles from Boudun. Otherwise, she’s dead before we reach the city walls.”
“I have no wish to die, friends. Take the leg if you can. I have two, after all.”
With a weary sigh, Auric nodded. “We can.”
Auric drew his serrated hunting knife, used a hundred times to clean game brought down by his bow. He inspected the blade, glad for his habit of maintaining weapons well. He looked at the priest and then at Belech. “How far up should we cut?”
Belech loosened the tourniquet, took the priest’s pantleg in hand, and tore it up to her thigh, taking care to be as gentle as he could. Sira winced and squeezed tears from the corners of her eyes. They all looked down at the wounded leg. Wiping away the blood with a cloth he took from his tunic, the old soldier revealed dark shoots creeping up just shy of her knee. He moved the leather strap further up her thigh and tightened it again. The priest tried to keep from crying out, but failed.
“Just above the knee, then,” said Auric.
Belech sat on the ground behind the priest and put his big arms around her chest, cradling her against him. Auric handed her another strip of leather. “This will help a little,” he said. “Bite down on it.”
Sira smiled again; a crooked thing, weaker than before. Perspiration covered her pale brow. “Belu give me strength. Give all of us strength,” she said, and opened her mouth to accept the bit. Auric reached over to the fire and pulled out his blade. Sira, teeth clamped down on the leather, gave the blade a wary look, then nodded slowly.
Auric rested his left hand on the tourniquet above her knee and decided on the place he would cut, steeling himself for the task. He noticed a tremor in the hand that held the hunting knife as he brought the blade down toward the young woman’s pale flesh. There was a terrible, endless moment before Auric could bring himself to draw the knife across the priest’s pale flesh, but at last he made his first cut with a sawing motion, and a bright bloom of blood erupted as the steel parted Sira’s skin. She cried out in agony, startling birds from the trees. Belech hugged her closer as the blade bit deeper into the meat of her thigh. A wave of nausea crawled from Auric’s gut to his throat, and his vision went black.
Lenda cried out as one of the golem’s blades sliced across her cheek, blood blooming where the steel parted her skin. Auric parried a second blow from the thing’s other sword that would have decapitated her, then threw his weight against the automaton, hoping to knock it off balance, maybe even send it toppling over. Only moments before, the statue had looked like the other silent limestone guardians lining the hall, but as they passed it the crocodile-headed thing had stepped down from its pedestal and swung its arms against the wall, shedding earthy flakes from the carved swords it wielded. Real gleaming metal was revealed beneath the sculpted stone.
But it was as though he had thrown himself into the city walls of Boudun: the golem didn’t budge an inch, instead bringing a sword-wielding fist into his face, breaking his nose. A cluster of stars burst before his vision and Auric staggered backward, leaving Lenda to parry the thing’s renewed swings and thrusts on her own. Just as she deflected one blow, another came down, requiring lightning-quick speed to drop beneath the attack, balancing herself on the stone floor with her left hand. But then the golem’s other weapon came flashing down, biting into the meat between her neck and shoulder—
Auric was in the clearing again, propped against a tree. The wounded priest was unconscious but breathing steadily, lying on a pallet on the opposite side of the campfire. Her bloody stump was wrapped in cloth secured by the tourniquet, and the severed limb in a neat package beside her. Belech, cleaning the last of the blood from his hands, cast the rag he used into the flames.
“I passed out,” said Auric, licking his dry lips.
“Not really,” Belech answered matter-of-factly, coming to his side. The old soldier handed him his hunting knife, which showed no signs of the bloody work just accomplished. Auric closed his eyes and exhaled, as if he could expel the shame.
“I’m sorry,” he croaked, then coughed to clear an awkward catch in his throat.
“You froze up, seemed to blank out on us,” responded Belech in a voice that was gentle, yet did not condescend. “I’ve seen it before in mates after a battle, who I’d fought beside a hundred times. Everyone has a breaking point. Every one of us bears scars. At least the ones who don’t take pleasure from slaughter.” He grimaced, one of his own unpleasant recollections apparently crossing his mind. He shook his head, perhaps to dispel the memory. “Anyway. We have to make a stretcher for her.”
Auric made to stand. “I’ll do it.”
“Don’t trouble yourself, Auric,” Belech said, putting a hand on his shoulder as he stood. “I can manage.”
“Please,” Auric replied, looking the old soldier in his pale blue eyes. “You take a rest. I want to be useful.” Belech paused, then nodded, planting himself against the same tree Auric had been propped against.
Auric gathered some likely branches from the forest around them and began tying them together with twine from his saddlebags, forming the frame. Belech allowed him to work in silence for some time before he ventured a conversation. What he asked came as a surprise. “So, what happened to her, this Lenda, if you don’t mind me asking?”
Auric smiled a thin-lipped smile, swallowed. “What is it you heard me say?”
“You said, ‘Lenda, be careful.’ Several times.”
Auric laughed without mirth as he knotted twine, glad to have some occupation for his hands. “I spoke those words to her more often than any others.” Another pause. “She was killed by a walking corpse in the ruins of a Djao temple in the Barrowlands. The thing ripped out her throat like it was plucking a ripe apple from a tree.”
“Forgive me, Auric. A terrible way for someone you love to die.” Belech touched forehead and lips, warding off evil.
“It was quick, and she died fighting next to someone who loved her like his own blood. I’ve seen worse fates in the League. Trust me.”
“We’ve all lost comrades and loved ones,” Belech said after a moment. “Inevitable when you’ve lived as long as we have. And if you’ve lived hard. You have my respect and my tears, comrade Auric.”
When the stretcher was done, its poles secured so that it would be drawn behind Glutton, they gingerly loaded the insensate priest. She murmured something neither could make out. Belech loaded the severed leg with the rest of his baggage on Lugo, wrapped now in one of his spare shirts. With luck, the priests at her cathedral, dedicated to the goddess of healing and renewal, might be able to reattach the limb with divine rituals, though it was no sure thing.
Auric led on Glutton, setting an easy pace, making sure to give Sira as tender a ride as he could manage. She remained unconscious, though an occasional delirious sob escaped her lips. After a conversation about the inscrutability of the priestly orders, the two men fell quiet. Belech brought up the rear, making sure the ropes used to secure Sira to her pallet didn’t work themselves loose.
The silence left Auric alone with his worries. For Agnes’s plight, whatever it was, and for this sudden reappearance of those things that had plagued him after emerging from the bloody Djao ruin that had nearly been his tomb. Blacking out at the sight of some blood? He had seen rivers of it over the years,
his own and others’, colleagues closer than siblings. He held out his right hand, watched it tremble for a moment before grabbing Glutton’s reins again, his knuckles whitening with the grip. The thought of downing a bottle of wine crept into his mind like a predator, cunning and cruel. The image of his father’s sour, grizzled face quickly banished that destructive notion and he turned his attention instead to the road before him.
By late afternoon the trees began to grow sparse. After another mile or two Auric spied the walls of Boudun and its looming, ancient towers in the misty distance. “Ever been to the capital?” asked Auric.
“Never closer than little Daurhim,” Belech answered, standing in the saddle to get a better look at the city on the horizon.
“A quarter of a million people were living there when I left it,” Auric said, thinking he could make out the grand bell tower of the royal palace, center of the capital and the entire empire. “You could sense things beginning to come apart then, like an old garment with its seams showing. I don’t know what we can expect.”
Auric resisted the urge to give Glutton a kick to quicken her pace, remembering slumbering Sira trailing behind him. He reassured himself that they would be at the gates of the city before the sun dipped much lower in the dusky blue sky.
3
The Blue Cathedral
The walls of Boudun, forty feet tall and built of stone quarried in the rolling Tona Hills to the south, had stood for over eight hundred years. They embraced the entire expansive city, daunting towers set every hundred yards. In all the years of their existence, an enemy army had never breached the imposing edifice, though several had tried. Most travelers entered the city through its broad harbor, but those approaching from inland passed through an entrance known as the Mouth of Boudun: three adjacent gates separated by defensive towers with crenelated roofs. Traditionally, the heads of traitors and rebels were mounted on pikes permanently set atop those roofs as a warning to any who would defy the might of the kingdom of Hanifax and its rulers. When Auric had been resident in the city, it was unusual to find more than two or three decapitated enemies welcoming travelers into the empire’s capital.
As Auric and his companions approached the Mouth, he counted three dozen heads in varying stages of decomposition lining the rooftops. A coldness flooded Auric’s chest and his throat tightened.
“Has there been a plot against the Crown?” asked Belech, morbid wonder in his voice.
“If so, news of it hasn’t reached Daurhim. Besides, judging from the state of those heads I’d say some are more than a month old, some much newer. Those three on the right are distressingly fresh. If there had been a major move against the throne you’d expect them to match one another, rot-wise. They tend to dispatch them in one big group.”
“Queen Geneviva—long may she reign—sends ten or twenty to the executioner’s yard over the course of a month,” said Sira in a hoarse whisper, still prone on her stretcher. “Some don’t wear her rule well, regrettably.”
While traffic from the west was thin, a larger stream of visitors approached the city from the south. The port of Falmuthe lay at the end of that highway a hundred miles distant, and before that several other sizable towns like Menkirk and Zoteby. Scrutiny of each traveler at the three gates slowed the process of entry enormously. While waiting their turn, Auric had plenty of time to witness the chief clerk at the gate they had chosen; a surly man wearing a linen tunic that hadn’t been laundered since the world was young, he bullied and berated one traveler after another. Auric had seen many such petty officials abuse their authority in his days with the League. He spat on the cobblestone pavement.
The walls of the city itself were long overdue for whitewashing. Bits of graffiti were scrawled and scratched on their surfaces, the individual declarations of the many who had come to Boudun (“I exist! I was in this place at this time!”), along with just as many casual vulgarities and witticisms of varying merit. Guards leaned on halberds or against the defaced walls, barely attending to the nearby haughty clerks and functionaries accosting those queued at the gates. Armor was unpolished, shirts stained and soiled, weapons poorly maintained. Bits of lunch clung to beards, and a pungent reek of alcohol rose from the unsteady watchman nearest the entryway clerk when they finally reached the gate themselves, just as the sun was obscured by the city’s columns of towers.
“Names, and the purpose of your visit to Boudun?” barked the linen-clad clerk. Another man next to him, hairless and of indeterminate age, wearing nothing but a loincloth, held up a large book for the gate official, who himself held a quill and jar of ink at the ready.
“I am Auric Manteo and this is Belech Potts, both of Daurhim and bound for the Citadel.”
“And what business do you have with the Citadel?” the gate official growled, frowning. “Selling some trinket stolen from granny’s grave?”
“On the Citadel’s business,” Auric responded, thin-lipped and terse. He held up his letter from Pallas Rae, making sure the unmistakable seal of the Syraeic League was visible. The official ignored the document, looking instead at Sira, who despite her fatigue was propping herself up on her pallet, observing the interaction over her shoulder.
The clerk craned his neck to take in Sira, then looked back down at the book held before him. “You have the look of a beggar-to-be,” he observed. The priest’s garments were indeed a mess after the trial she had been through. “It seems now that beggars are conveyed into Boudun on makeshift palanquins to suck off the queen’s tit, long may she reign.”
Sira mustered the most charming smile she could in her weakened state. “Sira Edjani of the Blue Cathedral,” she said, raising a feeble hand in salutation. “The Mother’s blessings on you, citizen.”
The man looked up from his book, scowling. “Bugger Belu and her blessings,” he spat, wiping a fleck of spit from the corner of his mouth with an ink-stained hand. Belech’s face went white at the blasphemy, and Sira grimaced. Auric felt cracks forming in the dam of his emotions, still shaken and embarrassed by his failure with Sira’s surgery.
“I am here on the Citadel’s business, you bloody wretch,” he shouted, waving the letter in the man’s face. “And this priest has lost a great deal of blood and needs to reach the temple immediately. So write our names down in your damned book and let us pass, or we can call a lictor from the League so she can come down here and ring your self-important skull like a church bell!”
The inebriated guard and two of his companions took notice at last, propping themselves upright with their polearms and stepping forward with interested grins. They made no move to intervene. “Like a church bell!” laughed one, a slovenly armored woman with red hair.
Their ink-stained interlocutor’s mouth went wide. His eyes narrowed, and he brushed a cheek with the back of his writing hand as though he had been slapped. He capped his jar of ink and balanced it on the book’s open page, then snatched the letter from Auric’s hand. He examined the seal closely with an eyeglass that hung around his neck on a leather cord, then scanned the letter itself.
“Yes, this appears to be genuine,” he grumbled, turning up his nose and handing the letter back to Auric. He turned to Belech and Lugo and poked the cloth-wrapped bundle strapped to the horse with his quill. “What in the Yellow Hells is this?”
“Her leg, friend,” snarled Belech, apparently emboldened by Auric’s eruption. “Now let us pass or I’ll beat you over the head with it.”
This brought loud chuckles from the guards, who seemed to find it all marvelous entertainment. Even the hairless man next to the clerk sniggered and received an angry cuff for his trouble. With a brief glare at Auric, the belittled clerk dipped his quill and wrote their names with quick, livid strokes in the book. He hawked phlegm noisily and spat it at the cobblestones, hitting Glutton’s hoof instead. This marksmanship summoned a grin to his face. The petty insult seemed sufficient defiance for the clerk, who gave them a dismi
ssive wave through the gate before shouting for the next travelers in line.
Auric counted the drunkards lying beside the thoroughfare as they made their way into the city, stopping when he reached twenty. Trash littered the noisome streets. He felt something in his bones, a sense that things were terribly wrong in the great city, as though its soul was somehow ailing, corrupted.
The city’s temple district was past the crowded grand market east of the Mouth of Boudun. They passed the great façades of cathedrals dedicated to the major deities of the pantheon: the tall black brick edifice of Marcator, husband of Belu and king of the gods; the squat and broad temple of the war god, Vanic, bristling with war trophies from the kingdom’s centuries-long history; the wooden, vine-covered shrine to Chaeres, goddess of the harvest. All showed signs of neglect. Some temples to the lesser gods were actually dark within, as though closed for business. Only one of the five towering chimneys of the forge-temple of Velcan vented smoke into the sky—in all his time in Boudun, Auric had never witnessed even a single smelting furnace dormant, let alone four. In stark, mocking contrast to the others, the temple to Timilis, trickster god of thieves and low sorcerers, was adorned with all manner of gilding, flowers and jewels, and its entryway was crowded with supplicants queuing to make sacrifices within, even this late in the day.
Timilis ascends, thought Auric, while the other gods are chipped away from our very foundations. Auric was never an overly pious man. He did his necessary obeisance to the chief deities of the pantheon, but he was no zealot, and didn’t even count one of the gods as his patron. But this…religious disarray…it made him uneasy.
Warmth bloomed in Auric’s heart upon reaching Belu’s great temple, the Blue Cathedral. Its façade was as lovely as he remembered it: polished lapis lazuli inlays that gave the grand temple its name, the marble idol of the goddess with its outstretched arms at the entrance, embracing all, crowned with fresh leaves of laurel. By the time they were in the cathedral’s courtyard, turning over a shaking and smiling Sira to four solicitous acolytes, the sun was beginning to set. Before they bore the priest away on a stretcher, she told everyone who would listen that she owed Auric and Belech her life.