Twig

by wildbow

  One of ours, coming back. We’d meet them at the road that led from the city to the hill manors.

  Helen and Shirley’s conversation was winding down, it seemed.

  “…would be a waste if you didn’t,” Helen said.

  “I’d like all of us to get to a place where I didn’t have to do anything like that with people we didn’t like, let alone carry a garotte with them,” Shirley said. “If I had any dream or goal beyond situating myself well and rising from my current station, it would be seeing everyone get there.”

  “Speaking of goals…” Mary said. “I wouldn’t mind discussing that.”

  “If you’re asking me I know what my goals are,” Helen said.

  “I was thinking Sy should chime in,” Mary said.

  I looked skyward, letting the rain patter against my face.

  “We know what we’re doing in the big picture. Claiming the Crown States. I know Jessie was clear on that. Jessie and Sy had that as a defined plan. And… you’re doing what you do, Sylvester. Now that something’s firmed up, you’re revolving and spiraling around it.”

  Helen lifted my hand up. I dutifully spun her around, as if we were dancing. She smiled brilliantly, before raising a hand to her face, pushing wet hair out of the way and tucking it behind her ear.

  “I understand if you want to keep quiet, if keeping quiet is one of the things that’s helping you to stay balanced, somehow,” Mary said. “Even if I don’t understand how that works in the slightest.”

  I shook my head.

  “Three major hurdles to overcome,” I said.

  “More than three, I’d imagine,” Helen said.

  “Big hurdles. Three gods to slay,” I said. “Three gods to overcome.”

  “Gods? Do I need to be worried about where you’re at after all, Sy?” Mary asked.

  I twisted around in Helen’s firm grip to glance back at Mary. I gave her a smile. “I’m fine.”

  Mary had a parasol, and wore a very nice red dress with crimson lace, a ribbon at one side of her head. Beside her, the flesh-suit giant walked with Jessie in its arms, one of its hands holding a similar parasol to shield Jessie’s upper body from the rain. A raincoat was draped over her legs to waterproof them. Jessie looked so small.

  “You were saying something about gods?” Helen asked me.

  “Yes. Gods, my dear Helen G. Ibbot and Miss Mary Cobourn. Great, unknowable, and potentially very intelligent forces who could yet tear us to pieces, even now. Especially now.”

  “Can I tear them to pieces?” Helen asked. “Or twist them up?”

  “One or two of them, I think, given opportunity.”

  “I’ll look forward to that, then,” she said. “You look to giving me those opportunities.”

  “Why ‘gods’, Sylvester?” Mary asked.

  “Because they’re not people, they’re not something we can stick a knife in or remove from the picture with carefully worded letters. They’re timeless in a way, they were there before we came into this world, they’ve been there all along, they’ll be there when we leave.”

  “Are these real things or, again, do I need to consider putting a knife through the back of your knee?” Mary asked.

  “Stop saying that! When I end up getting knifed or shot, it’s going to be because of a conversation that starts with ‘I’m very worried about Sylvester.’”

  “Most of our conversations start that way,” Helen observed.

  “I know,” I said. “But I’d really like to focus on killing and subjugating god, not on the sad, slow decline of Sylvester. Let’s hammer this out.”

  “Alright,” Mary said. “I can do focus.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Your ‘gods’. You’re not being abstract?”

  “Real, concrete things. Problems, enemies in broad but very definable senses.”

  “Okay, so if I had to guess, going by the things you tend to natter about—”

  “Natter? Natter?” I asked. I twisted around. “Jessie, they’re being mean to me. Make them stop.”

  Jessie slept on.

  Mary’s eyes tracked mine very carefully. I saw a fractional shift in how her lips pressed together.

  “I know she’s asleep,” I whispered.

  Mary snapped her fingers. “Power.”

  “Power is absolutely one,” I said.

  “And control?”

  “Not at all,” I said. I smiled. “We just spent the last year working on bringing that particular god to heel, didn’t we?”

  “I suppose we did,” Mary said.

  “Think on it,” I said. “There’s no rush, no time limit except the one we’ve had since the early days, and of course if the god ends up dead before you name ’em, you miss your window.”

  “You’re appealing to my competitive side,” Mary said.

  “I suppose I am.”

  “And you’re appealing to Helen by giving her gods to embrace.”

  “Please,” Helen said.

  “Maybe,” I said. “Maybe. But maybe I also did bring it up as a way to tempt.”

  “I’m rusty,” Mary said. “Figuring you out, trying to keep up, thinking outside of the box so I might keep up with you. I’m starting to feel like this is more familiar. It’s nice.”

  “I’m rusty too,” I said. “I’ve been trying to figure it out, but I want to work with the Lambs on this. What comes next could be very hard. If I’m doing a good job of pulling your strings and Helen’s tongue, appealing to your best parts in the process, I’m glad.”

  Mary nodded.

  “Helen’s tongue?” Shirley asked.

  “Her… Helen-ness. Her appetite, in all the things that tongues can be used for.”

  “I do like that,” Helen said. “Do keep using your own tongue in clever ways with me, Sylvester. It’s fun.”

  Getting Shirley’s attention with a movement of my head, I gestured at Helen for effect. “See? Helen’s tongue. It works.”

  “Dangerously well,” Mary observed.

  “I see,” Shirley said.

  “And Sylvester, sir,” Helen said, and she smiled, “let me know if you need any advice on pulling on Duncan and Ashton’s somethings. I’ve spent a lot of time with them over the past few years.”

  Shirley cleared her throat.

  “I’ll let you know, Hel,” I said. “I’m pretty sure I know how they operate from a mechanical standpoint. I can figure out the rest.”

  She laid her head on my shoulder, and I put my arm around her.

  We hadn’t made mention of Lillian. Somehow all of us knew that it wouldn’t have gone good places. Not with things where they stood, and not with Jessie’s role in the conversation.

  The flag-bearer moved the flag, pointing it.

  They were indicating which carriages it was, and the little caravan wasn’t on the main road.

  I changed position. My hand was still tender, and it nearly seized up as I scaled the side of a house and climbed onto the roof, settling onto a perch at one corner.

  “Ah,” I said.

  “Not the Lambs,” Mary said, beside me. I’d barely heard her ascend.

  The carriages took the road normally reserved for the denizens of the hill. Men opened the door and climbed up onto the sides, hanging off of them. They kept watchful eyes out.

  They stopped on the road. Making us come to them, perhaps.

  Or they didn’t want to venture too close. Like this, they could at least attempt a haphazard getaway.

  Mary and I descended to the road. We signaled and broke into a jog.

  They had all climbed out of the carriages by the time we arrived. We slowed down before stepping into view, walking as a group with an easy, natural formation. Shirley hung back.

  Mauer stood in a congregation of his rebel soldiers. He was in the heart of the Crown States, near one of its remaining major cities, with half or two-thirds of the nation’s armed forces gathered in the surrounding region. He was one word from having the entirety of that turned on
him.

  It would have been one thing if he’d been in that situation and he’d remained calm. That was a thing.

  But he was here, and he was pissed.

  “Mauer,” Helen greeted him. “I would call you reverend, but you don’t like that, I remember.”

  “Calling me Mauer is fine,” he said.

  “When we told our soldiers to let you through, we didn’t anticipate you showing up at the foot of our warcamp,” Mary said.

  Mauer’s voice carried across the distance, “Something tells me that if I were to find a convenient clearing and send a message, you’d be too occupied with other matters to respond. What would I do then? Find my way to you through your assembled forces? Would I try to steer your course? I told them to take me to you. You gave them permission to bring me here.”

  “We actually anticipated Fray doing the bold arrival in the enemy’s midst when we left that instruction,” I said. “This works too, mind.”

  “I sent a soldier to be captured and leak information about Ferres acquiring an immortal,” Mauer said. “As was requested.”

  “Thank you,” Helen said.

  “I did not expect this,” Mauer said.

  I spread my arms. “You don’t like the notion of turning the Crown against their own, as they tried to turn us against each other?”

  He turned his body, as if he needed the right posture to move his arm, and hauled his monstrous arm free of the coat that covered it. The mangled, distorted, oversized arm raised one index finger.

  When he spoke, it was with a very dangerous tone. His people were reacting to the tone, shifting their stances. “I would very much like that notion, if I thought it was leading to justice and right. Something tells me it isn’t.”

  “What would be just and right, Mauer?” Mary asked.

  “Mary Cobourn,” Mauer said. “I knew someone with your face and name when she was a child. But you’re Percy’s creation, aren’t you?”

  Mary nodded.

  “He also wronged you. He did you an injustice.”

  “I see what you’re saying, but it was the injustices he did to others that I acted on. On behalf of people close to me who mind those things.”

  I wanted to comment or indicate something, to let Mary know that that lie was old, that I and everyone else should already know that she had more heart than she pretended. I didn’t, however, want to give any sign of weakness to Mauer. I didn’t take my eyes off of the man.

  “Remind all of us, please, just how you addressed that wrong of his.”

  “I executed him.”

  “Tell me, then. Between you, you seem hold the assembled forces of the Crown States and its lesser Academies in your hands. You give orders and speeches here and there, and the enemy’s armies move for you. You forge letters, and you make them act for you. You have them utterly at your mercy.”

  “We do,” I said.

  “Will you cast them down, Lambs?” Mauer asked. “Will you tell me my instinct is wrong, and that you will set one of them against the other with the intent of destroying both, or in hopes of leaving one of the two weak and vulnerable to a knife in the back?”

  “There are better things we can do,” I said.

  “They are a festering thing, Lambs,” Mauer said. He clenched his monstrous fist, still holding it before him. “They are overgrown and twisted to the point that they barely serve the purpose they were intended for. They are a system corrupted, that inflicts needless damage and stress on itself for reasons that have been forgotten. They are a cancer, Lambs. Cut them free. Be ruthless, and excise the surrounding tissue.”

  “You’d have us set them up to wipe them out?” Mary asked.

  “You hold their vitals in your hands, Lambs. Not the heart, not the brain, but enough. Crush those vitals.”

  The look in his eyes was murderous.

  “You would advocate mass murder, Mauer?” I asked.

  “The Crown doesn’t lose,” Mauer said. “That’s the saying.”

  “That’s not the whole saying,” I said. “Because they do lose here and there. You know that. You’ve had your small victories.”

  That anger was still etched on his features as he acknowledged me.

  “It’s that if and when it looks like they’re losing, they’re so big they drag you down with them. They make it a draw, if they can’t make you regret trying.”

  “Lambs,” Mauer said. He sounded so menacing that I thought one of his younger soldiers might take initiative and act on that anger, shooting us as a kind of punctuation. His face was etched with deep lines. “You should be aware of how many rebel groups have come and gone. You’ve seen people who struggled alone or as part of armies against the Crown. You’ve seen people use sword, knife, gun, bare hand, pen, word, and every other tool they can bring to bear against this enemy.”

  “We’ve been thoroughly introduced to those people. We count many of them among our number,” I said.

  Behind me, there was noise. I worried it would be the very people Mauer was wanting to crucify. It was the other Lambs. They were roughly on schedule. Lillian, Duncan, and Ashton. Behind them, I saw the aristocrats Chance, Lainie, and more glorious and monstrous than any of Ferres’ fairy tale creations, a thoroughly modified Emily Gage, with sweeping horns and flesh that included decorative scaling in amazingly intricate patterns. Her eyes were missing from the sockets, and each of her hands ended in two sets of claws.

  I smiled. I turned back to Mauer as Lillian, Duncan and Ashton joined us. All three had their hoods up, protecting them from the steady, easy rainfall.

  Something about being interrupted when he’d been making his speech seemed to push him into another dimension of anger.

  “Hundreds of millions have fought against this force that Wollstone armed and brought into being,” Mauer said, and his tone was lower. “It’s not beyond the realm of imagination to suggest it could be a full billion or more human beings who were raised from the womb into the world, who fought the Crown desperately and went to meet their creator.”

  “Not beyond the realm of imagination, no sir,” I said, my own voice pitched to match his.

  “How many of them had their chance at this? At a true, honest, undeniable victory? A chance to gut them, and wrest a continent from their grip.”

  He was gesturing with his monstrous hand again, clenching his fist and turning it in the air as if to tear something forth from reality.

  “And what is it you intend?” he growled. “Because something that gravely concerns me, gravely concerns me…”

  His voice was at the point where it almost wasn’t a word as he uttered ‘gravely’ the second time.

  “…As I take this in and as I find you here, of all places, is that it very much seems that you aren’t looking for that victory, Lambs. You asked for my cooperation and promised me satisfaction, and yet I’m left to believe you aren’t going to take this justice that we have at hand.”

  I remained silent, watching him.

  “Tell me I’m wrong, Sylvester. Any of you. Raise your voices, and give me my satisfaction!”

  I’d heard him speak, and I’d heard him raise his voice to be heard by a crowd, exclaiming, but I couldn’t remember hearing him speak at this volume, with this degree of rage.

  “Tell me you aren’t going to take this and deliver a mere slap in their face. Tell me you aren’t going to give them a draw!”

  “You want satisfaction,” I said. I tried to let my own voice carry.

  He set his jaw.

  “The reason we sent Helen to you was that we thought she would understand you best. You’re both impossible to satisfy. You will always want more blood, more satiation. If you were a glutton you’d eat until your stomach split. But you want to somehow… what is it? See them pay for their cumulative sins of the last century in the span of a few short years? That’s not possible.”

  “I’ll settle for what’s possible,” Mauer said.

  “And that might have been the first lie you’
ve ever told us,” I said. “What would you do once you’ve settled? Would you retire?”

  I paused. I watched him.

  “…Or would you resume your crusade?”

  I watched him bow his head, as if in prayer, but his face was contorted.

  “We need doctors and soldiers to keep plague at bay, and to act in the event that the Crown realizes something is amiss and brings a fresh war from over the ocean. We need a lot of things, and if we did what you wanted, we might get that justice you describe, but it would come at the expense of our lives, on several fronts.”

  He clenched his fist.

  “You know this, Mauer. You’ve always known this. Even in the most peaceful period of the Crown States’ history under Empire rule, there was never going to be a reality where you could see your rhetoric come to bloody fruition.”

  He turned his head, speaking to his lieutenant. I could read his lips. ‘We’ll leave soon. Before they surround us or call reinforcements. One more question.’

  I continued, “You just don’t care. You’ve always been willing to destroy yourself in pursuit of this end. You’d ask everyone to follow you in that martyred pursuit of revenge.”

  He closed his eyes. His hand fell to his side. I watched as he composed himself, relaxing, surrendering.

  “Reverend,” Lillian spoke.

  Oh, she’d missed that part.

  He raised his human hand, holding it up. Whatever approach Lillian had been planning to make, she held back.

  He spoke, and he spoke calmly, as if none of the anger was there anymore. “You made me another promise.”

  “We did,” I said.

  “You told me that you would reveal the truth of the Block.”

  “I did,” Helen said.

  “Then tell me,” he said. “And I’ll take this knowledge, and… if I don’t stay, to wage my part in what’s about to unfold here, I’ll leave for other shores. I’ll wage my war there, in places that aren’t quite so vast. I’ll gather my flock.”

  He sounded so eerily calm.

  The voice, too was calm. Only I heard it.

  Do not tell him about the Block. Lie to him where necessary.

  My hand hurt as I clenched it into a fist. The skin was new, as were some of the connective tissues that held the skin in place.