by Tim Clare
Lady Dellapeste’s lips curled into a smile below her mask.
‘What do you think my daughter’s powers will be?’
Hagar glanced at the two diamond-shaped portholes. The glass was thick and braced with lead crosspieces. Impossible to escape through without tools.
‘I couldn’t say for sure.’
‘But in your best estimation. You’ve lived so very long, after all.’ Lady Dellapeste rose easily from her chair, the blanket dropping round her boots. ‘You must have your suspicions.’
Hagar glanced across at Cox. On the table beside him was a bottle of Avalonian nectar – putrid, viscous stuff made from heavily spiced fermented berries – and a blue glass bottle of Cambridge rum, almost empty, a sunbeam lighting up a cut crystal tumbler beside it.
‘A peer has not given birth within my lifetime. But there are rumours that it happened once before.’
Lady Dellapeste’s head shifted beneath her hood as she turned to look at the baby. ‘Go on,’ she said through Cox.
‘I have offered my opinion, Endlessness.’
‘What powers did her predecessor have?’
‘You don’t know?’
Within the mask, her eyes narrowed. ‘I am asking that you tell me.’
Hagar tried to appear blandly oblivious to the danger she was in. ‘It’s said he ate pain. He could use it to shape reality into whatever he desired. Nothing was impossible to him. He raised palaces from bare rock. Crossed the globe in a blink. Flattened cities with a snap of his fingers. Undid death.’
Anwen brought her palm down on the arm of the chair. ‘Enough!’
Sarai started whimpering softly. Cox stood, shakily, and began to pace back and forth, rocking the baby. He kept his gaze on his daughter as he channelled his mistress, intoning words as if dictating to a secretary: ‘Thank you, Miss Ingery, for confirming what I have long suspected. The great houses of the perpetuum know how powerful she is likely to be and consequently will make plans to deal with the existential threat she poses to them.’
‘Endlessness . . . forgive my presumption, but it sounds as if you fear my master might wish your daughter harm.’ Her mouth had gone dry. ‘Upon my soul, I will tell him nothing of our meeting if you wish it.’ She would tell him nothing of the meeting regardless.
‘Upon your soul?’ Cox’s voice rang with mocking wonder. ‘Didn’t you already sell it to the Butcher of Atmanloka?’
Hagar flinched. They would not speak of Morgellon with such candour if they had any intention of letting her live.
She straightened her spine. ‘He grieves, Endlessness. You’d want to carve your sorrow into the world if you’d lost all he has.’ The impropriety of making such personal remarks had a delicious electric edge.
Lady Dellapeste rose from her chair. ‘And you, Mistress Ingery. You of the three centuries. What have you lost?’
A strange ache clutched at the pit of Hagar’s stomach. Her nostrils burned with a phantom smell. These people were just children. They had not the slightest conception of true suffering. They would learn in time, of course. The honours guaranteed that.
Hagar looked Anwen in the eyes. ‘Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? Have the gates of death been opened unto thee?’
Lady Dellapeste’s lower lip curled with disdain. ‘Three hundred years,’ said Cox, ‘and you still parrot the drab axioms of Scripture. How very ordinary you are, little girl.’
Hagar allowed her head to sag under the rebuke. Behold, I am vile. Perhaps Anwen would underestimate her if she seemed contrite.
‘Endlessness, I perceive that I have offended you and beg your leave to retire.’
‘Your master is a coward.’
Hagar laughed – a husky, ruined bark from the back of her throat. ‘So are we all, in time.’ It had not always been so.
Cox hugged the swaddled child to his chest. ‘Mr Loosley will escort you back to your quarters.’
Hagar heard the click of the door unlatching. She spun round as he entered: a lean, broad-shouldered vesperi in a blue cassock edged with oval buttons and silver trim. His mouth was a snarl of mismatching teeth; a cudgel hung from one side of his belt, a flintlock pistol from the other.
Hagar had heard rumours Lady Dellapeste had taken a second valet. Not just male, but a vesperi – another childish attempt to scandalise the ganzplenum.
Arthur’s warning rang through her head. Loosley looked canny enough – calm, brutishly decisive – but did he expect her to submit without a struggle? Did he think it would be as easy as restraining a child?
‘Thank you for your hospitality, Endlessness.’
‘Before you go.’ Lady Dellapeste gestured towards Cox with an open palm. ‘Take a look at the child your master wants dead.’
Hagar hesitated, glancing between Anwen and Loosley. It was true that Morgellon would want Sarai dead. In this, he was not especially cruel – it was just sound politics.
Sarai’s scalp was coated in a slick of downy black hair. A constellation of deep red bruises showed where Hagar’s fingertips had dug into her skull. That such a fragile thing could end the world—
Hagar came round on the floor. A tone rang in her ears. Her temple pounded.
Someone had struck her. Don’t turn your back on Loosley. A pressure in the base of her spine. Someone was kneeling on her, binding her hands. Cord bit into her wrists.
She struggled, but it was too late. A wave of nausea washed through her.
And from somewhere off to the left, came the sound of a father crooning to his child, laughing.
Loosley waited till the sun had set, then lowered her, bound in chains and sailcloth, into the pinnace moored on the galleon Ceffyl Dŵr’s starboard side. The oars creaked in their mounts as he rowed out into open sea, his boots planted against the thwart, briar pipe hanging from the corner of his mouth.
The black ocean rose and slumped beneath them. Her tongue was folded against the stiff dry rag in her mouth. By the light of the moon she watched Loosley’s noseleaf flex in rhythm with his strokes. Once they were a good distance out, he slung the anchor over the side, sat and finished his pipe.
He had a purposeful composure that Hagar respected. She sensed no cruelty in him, and that was unfortunate, because it meant he was unlikely to linger over his task. He would not relish hurting her, would experience no pleasure except the brief satisfaction of a command successfully executed.
She watched thick, silver-edged clouds advancing in a slow avalanche, blotting out the stars. Why couldn’t Arthur appear now, in a blast of lucent vapour, and scare Loosley into the sea?
Impossible, of course. His brief appearance – and that idiotic trick with the trencher – would have left him exhausted. She would not see him again for weeks – perhaps months. Besides, Loosley did not strike her as the sort to startle easily.
She wondered if she was to die by drowning, like St Florian, or by stabbing, like St Cassian. She had experienced the latter many times by proxy – punctures and slashes from daggers, swords, pikes, javelins and polearms, and once when Morgellon had drunkenly slipped from the balcony of his summer palace in Fat Maw and spitted himself three storeys below on the glass minaret of an ornamental fountain. Drowning she had felt only once, when the royal fleet was lost to a storm off the Makashalam Peninsula; from what she remembered it was like being stabbed in both lungs simultaneously – the sucking, flooding throb, the horrible catch when the breath would not come.
Loosley tapped his pipe out into the water. He folded his arms and rested them across his bony knees. He was gazing towards the coast, where fires were burning under salt cauldrons, lighting the wet mouths of inlets that mazed inland towards seamilk paddies and jellyfish farms. A breeze ghosted the long whiskers around his mouth.
He sat like that for some time, watching the land. He lit another pipe and smoked it. Hagar wondered what he was waiting for.
He glanced at her. She could not see his eyes. In the darkness, with his ears protruding, his h
ead had the profile of a vast black moth. He reached towards her eyes with fingers that had fused into a claw.
His hand closed over the rag in her mouth. He tugged it out. Hagar coughed and gasped; the rag had absorbed all the moisture from her mouth and her tongue was covered in itchy fibres.
Loosley retrieved something from the bow and brought it towards her face. Metal glinted in the moonlight; she braced. Her lips felt the cold nozzle of a waterskin.
She had drunk nothing since breakfast. Water dribbled over her lips, lukewarm and chalky. Perhaps it was poisoned. More likely, this was his way of saying no hard feelings. She had encountered this type of senior henchman before – they eased their guilt through small acts of clemency, solidarity almost.
He let her drink till she turned her head away, water spilling down her lips. He set the waterskin down beside him and returned his gaze to the coast.
Hagar flexed her stiff jaw, running her tongue over her gums.
‘What’s your name?’ Her voice came out in a rasping whisper, even more desiccated than usual. Her throat felt raw and cracked.
His ear twitched.
‘The one they gave you at jatironi, I mean,’ she said. She was taking a gamble. Perhaps vesperi no longer sent their children away to complete their transitions. Traditions changed, and she did not always keep up.
Loosley rolled his shoulders back and yawned. He turned his head towards her, eyes gleaming with the faint lustre of fire opals.
‘She killed my sister.’
The voice that emerged from the scarred, broken-fanged face was soft and measured – hints of Low Thelusian’s glottal purr smoothed by the precise consonants of southern Sinpanian aristocracy. He glanced down, brushed something from the silver galloon trim of his cuffs.
Hagar was momentarily wrongfooted. ‘Lady Dellapeste?’
Loosley threaded his fingers and stared out across the water. He nodded.
‘My sister was murdered by her soldiers during the Wind and Thunder uprising.’ He breathed through the sharp prongs of his fangs. ‘They went town to town staging public executions.’
Hagar half-remembered reading reports of a merchants’ blockade over war duties. Her time in the abbey had distanced her from worldly affairs.
‘I ambushed her riverboat. Killed her guards. Broke into her cabin and shot her through the head.’
‘Alone?’
‘Of course. Relying on others would have risked betrayal.’
‘Of course.’
‘I never believed in the stories of peers regenerating. Thought this whole mess was folklore.’ Loosley grinned bitterly. ‘She sat up, soaked in blood. Mistook me for a common robber. Smiled. Offered me employment.’
‘Can she hear your thoughts?’
‘Not like Rutherford’s.’ Hagar recognised the subtle shift in his intonation all too clearly – revulsion, masking shameful, perverse jealousy. He wanted Anwen to need him, despite himself. He cleared his throat. ‘Perhaps it’s the species barrier. But I don’t think there’s a him or her any more. Their minds have bled into one. They can sense my mood. My rough location.’ He tapped the side of his skull. ‘They’re not here now. They sleep.’
The dock chains jankled as Hagar twisted in her constraints. The sailcloth was wrapped tightly around her, pinning her arms to her back. Her left leg had gone numb.
Loosley took a leather pouch from his coat and began refilling his pipe. ‘I hear you’re in disgrace.’
‘My master refuses to see me.’
‘Is it true you murdered his valet?’
‘It’s complicated,’ said Hagar.
Loosley struck a match and lit his pipe. He closed his eyes. His tattered, useless wings expanded as he inhaled. He blew a ball of smoke then drew in it with his index finger: a vertical stroke, two quick lateral slashes and a loop. It smeared apart on the wind.
A smokelorist’s prayer – a contract written on the air itself. How odd that Loosley should follow a religion that taught that change, decay and loss were unavoidable – he of the perpetual youth, he who feared death.
‘She’s planning to invade England.’
Hagar laughed sharply. ‘Impossible.’
‘We’ll see.’ He looked down at her. ‘She’d rather die than let anyone intimidate her.’
Hagar felt sick and strange. The motion of the boat seemed to amplify, growing stormy. Why was he telling her? A confession? A token show of rebellion? Or was it simply that, in a few moments, she would be dead?
Loosley’s silhouetted ears pricked. He straightened up, rotating his head left to right, then right to left, in slow, patrolling sweeps. He fixed her with a piercing stare.
‘If you had the chance to kill the Grand-Duc, would you?’
Hagar shut her eyes. She saw Morgellon in the throne room. Gold fixtures. She examined her heart and discovered a knotty pain.
‘I don’t know,’ she said honestly.
Loosley stood, looking landward.
‘Someone’s coming.’ He walked to Hagar and grasped the sailcloth binding her. With a grunt, he lifted her.
The chains hung heavy. She struggled to pull her arms free but she was tightly swaddled.
‘Wait,’ she said, panic rising.
Loosley flashed her a look of boredom. ‘Our time is up.’
He swung her out over the portside gunwale, the pinnace listing under the weight. She kicked and thrashed, but the sailcloth held fast. A breeze drifted from the shore, heavy with the scent of vassago bushes. In the distance, a lean yawl, its mainsail trimmed, was cutting through the milky water.
She looked back at Loosley. He inhaled, and the soft, fanning gills of his scarred-up noseleaf closed in on one another. She tried to think of something to delay him, some sly thrust. But she knew all too well the bluster of the condemned. Any pledge would look like a lie.
‘If you kill me, I can’t finish my work.’
Loosley hesitated. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘That’s precisely why I’m doing this.’
She felt his grip relax. She gasped. Her back slapped into the skin of the ocean. Cool water rushed over her ears, her face. Her vision blurred. A stream of silver bubbles rose from her trailing hair as she sank. Binding iron chains dragged her down, down. She relaxed her muscles. Better to conserve air until she touched the seabed, where the chains might slacken. The underside of the pinnace faded as light disappeared, a shrinking silhouette that merged with the night sky, as if Loosley’s little boat was rising to Heaven.
At last, her spine settled into silt. She kicked downwards with both feet, trying to squirm from her wrappings. He had bound her so tightly she could barely bend her knees. If she could pull an arm free from behind her back, the sail would loosen and she could escape.
Pinpricks of light sparked in a blue-black murk. The surface looked terrifyingly far away. She wanted to struggle, thrash, but she forced herself to think, strategise. The slightest unnecessary movement would consume air. Her head pounded, filling with a black fog.
She could feel death’s hunger. She had denied it all these years. Finally, it had come to claim her.
Her thoughts were melting into one another. This was it – the starvation of the brain, experienced from the inside. It had been vanity to follow Arthur, to believe he could lead her to salvation. Perhaps this was God’s will.
If she used her last moments to curse and fight, to feel fear and regret, to cling to life, she would perpetuate the cycle all over again. Who was she to deny providence?
Her heart drummed in her ears. She stopped resisting, let the heavy iron links pin her to the ocean floor. A fluttering glow spread across the darks of her closed eyelids. Her lungs filled with bursting, swelling pain.
They that are in the flesh cannot please God. She must submit.
In the darkness, golden flowers bloomed.
Submit.
Her head had gone numb. She tensed against the ache in her chest.
Submit.
She would never see Morgellon agai
n.
The thought cut through her pain. Morgellon, trapped in his wretched body, wracked by grief and greed and bitterness. How many countless centuries would he remain now, caught in delusion, sucking others into the threshing cyclone of his misery?
Submit.
He needed her. She was selfish to leave.
Submit.
She did not want to die. Not yet.
Submit.
She strained against her chains. Oh dear Lord, please save me. I am weak.
She had to breathe. Seawater licked her eyelids, her closed lips.
I am useless. I am nothing without your grace.
The whole seabed tilted around her skull. Her heels rose towards Heaven. She was passing out.
The bare flesh of her scalp dragged through silt. Her air-starved brain was hallucinating as it shut down. Back at the École De La Sagesse Immortels, she had read a fascinating book on the many anomalous artefacts generated by the mind in extremis, but oddly she could not recall any of them, hair brushing her face as she ascended, the ringing in her ears drowning out thought, merging with the sharp white light, with the ache in her chest, so sound and colour became one, she was returning to the vanishing point where all things merge, was remembering herself, was rising towards it rising rising—
She was actually rising. The shock almost made her inhale. She was upside-down and ascending, feet first, seawater flowing over her throat, around her jaw, pushing into her nostrils. Why was she rising? Oh God, she had to breathe. She bit her lip, fighting the craving for air.
She inhaled. Fluid hit her throat, her lungs. She coughed. Her chest knifed with cramps. She inhaled more water; the cramps turned to crushing pain. Sound returned: thumps and clanking iron. Wind whipped across her wet cheeks. She hacked; her chest stung. She was out of the water, hanging upside-down in mid-air.
Strong hands swung her up and round and dumped her onto the floor of a boat. Her breath snagged with each gasp; she rolled onto her side and hacked up sputum. Her eyes were raw from saltwater. She barely perceived the figure standing over her.
Hagar spluttered and spat. She hurt inside and out. It began to rain. Bullet-sized droplets drummed the deck. The figure spread their wings as an umbrella.