“What—”
Whatever question Jirella was going to call out died on her lips as a small black bird fluttered out of the hole in the wall, bobbing around the hanging stalactites toward her. Clumsy though it seemed, it flew with speed and intention. Jirella scooted back on the table, frantically looking to Barber Norton for help. He stayed pressed against the wall, watching her with ugly fascination. As it darted down at her, Jirella saw it wasn’t a bird at all. It was...something she had no name for, a bloated leach with buzzing dragonfly wings and ichor-dripping barbs.
It flew straight at her face, and on sheer instinct she batted it away, Fallen Mother forgive her.
Instead of falling out of the air the horror wrapped around her hand. Then the pain hit. It felt like she had seized a bouquet of nettles and then shoved her hand in a kiln. Instead of shaking the clinging monster off her hand, her whole body betrayed her, contorting on the mossy table as she screamed and screamed. Worse than the initial pain was the sensation of it slowly spreading as the terrible thing crawled under the cuff of her sleeve and up her wrist. Its very touch was so caustic her gown smouldered and burned away wherever its carapace brushed the velvet. It felt like a white hot coal being slowly dragged up her skin, the smoke from her own blistering flesh making her retch. Jirella stopped thrashing, now paralysed with pain as it worked its way up her arm, bringing mind-blistering agony as it crawled closer and closer to her shoulder. Her neck. Her face. Her foam-flecked lips.
She would have begged for death, had she been able.
Yet the Ordeal did not truly begin until it folded back its shimmering black wings and wriggled all the way inside her.
* * *
Jirella thrashed wildly on the table, her dress corroding off her in sizzling tatters and the moss beneath her baked black as she shrieked with all the fury of a wronged god. This was what she had become. No mortal could endure such pain and terror and live, yet Jirella’s agony grew and grew, lifting her again and again off the burning table. She could feel the thing inside her, prodding its needle limbs into her tender throat. She choked and gagged, but was no longer afraid. She was wroth.
The man in red. He had done this. She looked for him at the window-tiled wall, but he had crept over to the floor in the rear of the room, flinging up a trapdoor as her gaze found him.
Jirella flew at him, wailing. The Ebon Ghost’s wings beat between her lungs, carrying her aloft. Her smoldering shoes fell from her feet as she glided around the stalagmites, her toes dangling several inches off the bare floor of the cave.
The man in red disappeared through his trapdoor, metallic smoke billowing out. She dived down after him, into the fume. The smoke grew thicker, the air hotter, burning her eyes, burning her lungs. Compared to what the Ebon Ghost was doing inside her, blind and choking was a welcome distraction.
She must be falling straight down an ancient lava tube, through the walls of Castle Diadem, into the simmering bowels of the mountain. Jirella imagined the tunnel narrowing around her until she became stuck, lodged in the burning dark rock for all eternity, kept alive as punishment for her presumption. Her rage tried to spiral inward, but it found no purchase—the pain had hollowed Jirella out so perfectly there was nothing left inside for doubt to take hold of. Like a gale ripping through a canyon, her anger exploded back out of her throat.
The smoke became so dense it pressed back against her, slowing her fall, then halting it all altogether. She became lodged, just as she had envisioned, but instead of rock she was buried in whatever it was the smoke had thickened into, a rank tunnel of warm pulsing muscle. She recognized the smell from the barber’s office above, from the cage the Ebon Ghost had fled—it was the stink of a cockroach nest, of foul insects fornicating and defecating and eating each other in some small, hot space.
Jirella dug her nails into the soft, slippery wall and pulled herself forward, no longer sure if she was burrowing deeper into hell or climbing upward, toward heaven. Her blood boiled in her veins. Her skin bubbled off her bones. Yet she persisted. She had made of herself a temple for the Fallen Mother, and no matter what her enemies attempted she would not let that gift be lost down in the First Dark.
Then her fingers found not another burning handful of stinking insect waste, but the cool air of deep places. Seizing the rim of her prison, Jirella hauled herself free. She flopped out onto cold stone, the distended ovipositor leaking vile secretions in her wake. Distant chanting echoed off the walls like the droning of a hive. In the glare of thousands of candles she looked around to see from whence this monstrous birth canal originated, but saw only the titanic effigy of the Fallen Mother standing over her. There was no tunnel at the foot of the statue, no hole in the ceiling high above. She had come from nowhere.
The chanting grew louder. Jirella stood blinking as she wiped blood from her eyes. Not her blood. She was standing naked before the ikon of the Allmother, surrounded by gutted sacrifices, loops of entrails warming her feet. Hooded clerics with ornate silver devil masks stood on the steps beneath her, and beyond them a throng of robed worshippers filled the vast Lower Chainhouse, their hymn rising in time with Jirella’s whine.
The clerics had tricked her, luring her in with bleating offerings. Her eyes couldn’t focus enough for her to see if the bodies at her bare feet were the kids of goats or the children of mortals. She turned to scale the statue, to flee back into the First Dark, but the clerics were already on top of her, chaining her with burnished iron and ancient incantations. The Black Pope led them, his mitre unmistakable, but beneath the tall hat the face Jirella saw was not her uncle’s but her own.
His sibilant chant subdued her long enough for his clerics to chain her to the inverted cross, but when they began to scratch the secret mysteries of the Chain into her unset flesh she bucked in pain. Their scrimshawed quills jabbed through her guts, piercing the Ebon Ghost and harrying it deeper and deeper, poisoning it as it had poisoned her, and she wept for it. Sigils and glyphs pulsed beneath her skin, the steady hands of her assailants tracing them with their blades. A cardinal wearing the frozen grimace of one of the gargoyles she used to spit on back at the convent hunched over her loins with a scalpel and meticulously shaved a cross into the hair between her legs.
The Ebon Ghost wriggled its way into and through her bowel before tearing its way at last into her unspoiled womb, clarifying Jirella’s exquisite agony into something yet more transcendent. She knew that she would soon see the face of the Fallen Mother. The chanting came to crescendo as the heavens exploded in cleansing flame around her. A last thing Jirella remembered was a man in red picking up a small white egg in his gloved hand and placing it into a reliquary.
* * *
The final stage of the coronation would be torture of an entirely different sort, and far more humiliating than anything Jirella had endured in the midst of the Ordeal of the Ebon Ghost. She, the most important living mortal in all the Star, must supplicate herself to the Crimson Queen in the throne room they would share ever after. It was entirely symbolic, of course, Shanatu taking off his mitre and passing it to Indsorith, who would then plant it on Jirella’s brow, but it irked nonetheless.
At least it would soon be over. Jirella rose from her knees, her black robes of state chaffing her mortified flesh as she stood in front of the tapestry in her room. The likeness of the Fallen Mother had struck her as so impressive when first she had come here, but now it seemed so shabby compared to the oil painting that hung in the Papal suite. Hard to believe it had only been a week since she had come here—it felt like years.
“Don’t fret, Sister Vaura, I’m coming,” she told the war nun as the big woman stepped into her room. “This is one trial I won’t be late...for?”
The anathema had closed the door behind her and now turned the key in the lock. Jirella’s heart sank, but that only made her stand all the taller.
“Will you tell me who?” she asked as the purple-eyed giantess turned to face her. The anathema shook he
r heavy head, her penitent mask breathing heavier than Jirella would have expected. The woman didn’t want to do this, Jirella could tell...but she nevertheless unslung her enormous sword from her back. “You will tell me why, though. Whatever else you are, Sister Vaura, you’re a good Chainite, and we both know I am the true and rightful pontiff.”
“You are a puppet,” the anathema said sadly as she lifted her blade. “You are nothing but Shanatu’s surrogate, and you will keep torturing and enslaving my kind as he has always done.”
“And you think whichever Cardinal put you up to this will do any different?” Jirella hated this monster even more, now that she realized her naiveté. “Whatever they promised you, it’s a lie. We’ll both die for nothing.”
“My life is already forfeit,” said the big woman stepping closer. “If I spared your life, ma’am, would you swear to empty the Dens, to stop the pogrom against my people? Would you let the wildborn live as they are?”
A final test. Easily passed.
“I shall not compromise the sanctity of my post for any life, not even my own,” said Jirella. “Unlike those false Chainites you conspire with, I shall not swear any oath I do not intend to keep. I answer only to the Fallen Mother.”
“As do we all,” said Sister Vaura, drawing back her blade.
“Forgive me, Sister,” said Jirella, raising a shaking hand, “but pray grant me one final request?”
The war nun didn’t answer, but she didn’t chop Jirella in half, either. Not yet.
“Let me look upon your face again?” Jirella’s voice quavered. “If you are to be a martyr for the liberation of your people, let yourself be the first anathema to shed her Chainite trappings. And if I am to be the sacrifice that buys your salvation, allow me to gaze upon the righteous face of my executioner instead of an assassin hiding behind a mask.”
Instead of lowering her massive sword the war nun managed to hold it aloft with one hand as she reached up with the other and untied her mask. Jirella sucked nervously at her cheek. The anathema was even uglier than Jirella remembered. As the mask fell away, Sister Vaura made ready to carry out her execution, and Jirella stepped closer to accept the will of the Fallen Mother.
“Safe roads guide you to her breast,” whispered Jirella, staring up into the witchborn’s scarred face.
“Safe havens keep you at—” Sister Vaura began, but before she could complete the Prayer of Exodus, Jirella spat into the anathema’s open mouth. Then she wheeled about, diving onto the bed and rolling clear across it, waiting for that massive sword to split her in two, or smash the bed to pieces in the attempt. She landed on the floor on the far side and looked back to see her doom striding angrily toward her...
Yet Sister Vaura stood exactly where she had, the sword clattering to her feet as her shaking hands went to her wide-eyed face. Not only had Barber Norton spoken true of the change that had effected Jirella, but the potency of her poison was incredible—smoke began pouring from the anathema’s slack mouth. Sister Vaura sank her strong fingers into her own throat, blood welling out as she clawed at herself. She fell to her knees as she scraped deeper and deeper into her neck, fleshy cords snapping like harp strings. All the while those purple eyes stared at Jirella where she crouched on the far side of the bed. The anathema almost looked like she had been the one who’d been betrayed.
“Safe havens keep you at your rest,” Jirella told the monster when her relentless fingers exposed the white of her spine and she pitched forward onto her pitted face.
The girl stepped past the shuddering corpse of her protector and went to inherit the Burnished Chain.
* * *
According to the pomp of ancient ceremony and ecclesiastic symbolism, Jirella Martigore died that morning on the mist-kissed terrace of the Crimson Throne Room, cold grey clouds swirling overhead. In her place stood Pope Y’Homa III, Mother of Midnight, Shepherdess of the Lost, resplendent in vestments crafted from the iridescent feathers and inky fur of owlbats and beaded with a thousand black opals. The inverted cross of her scepter was carved from the petrified blood of an ancient devil queen. She was fifteen years old.
The faithful of the Star rejoiced.
Everything after Queen Indsorith placed the mitre on her head was a bit of an anxious blur of doubt and worry—her uncle had told her not to expect any great change, but she had hoped he would be proven wrong. Yet she didn’t feel any different, not at all. It seemed the Fallen Mother would find other ways than direct communication to guide Y’Homa’s hand, at least for the time being.
For now, she guided the hand herself, holding it out for her three Chief Officers to kiss the papal ring at the conclusion of the coronation.
First came Cardinal Artsidr, a willowy granddame with more spies than the rest of the College of Cardinals combined. She offered her new pontiff the sweetest of smiles as she pressed her wrinkled lips to the onyx ring. Pope Y’Homa imagined her whispering in the ear of Yekteniya and then Sister Vaura and she returned the crone’s smile with one of her own.
Next was Cardinal Ihsahn, a far younger and prettier woman than Y’Homa had expected. She barely grazed the ring with her lips, but Y’Homa flicked her finger, bumping the onyx against her mouth to make sure the Prelate of Samoth got the message. As liaison to the Crimson Court it was not a huge stretch to imagine her collaborating with Indsorith to kill Shantanu’s chosen successor, bribing Sister Vaura with a resolution the Crimson Queen already favoured.
Then there was Cardinal Wendell, a grotesque parody of a man whose lips smacked greedily against her ring. The Chain’s Minister of Propaganda didn’t seem to be nearly as clever as the others, but Y’Homa couldn’t be sure if his wits were genuinely dull or if his demeanour was simply a ruse to direct suspicion away from himself. He certainly seemed clever enough at his work, oiling shameless lies with sentimental qualifications and making sure every truth was inflated with his hot air until it swelled near to bursting. With his bland appeals to populist sentiment, could he have been the one to tempt a conflicted anathema into betrayal?
Well, it scarcely mattered now which of the three had attempted to thwart Y’Homa’s ascension, for they had all failed and now had no choice but to accept her rule. Not that they would get to enjoy that luxury for very long. Barber Norton had assured her that the contact poison they had coated her ring in would be slow-acting enough to not have them keel over on the spot, but before the sun next rose all three would die in the most exquisite agonies.
Her uncle would not be happy, but sorrow is the lot of mortals. If the Fallen Mother truly wanted any of Y’Homa’s Chief Officers to live, she would surely save them, just as she had saved Y’Homa many times over. Only the guilty would be punished. Y’Homa truly believed that.
“Shall we, Your Grace?” asked Queen Indsorith, nodding her crowned head at the twin seats that rose from the vast veranda of the Crimson Throne Room, here at the crest of Diadem’s cone.
“Certainly, Your Majesty,” said Pope Y’Homa III, taking the hand of the Crimson Queen. By striking his truce with the queen, Pope Shanatu had saved the flesh of the Crimson Empire. Now it fell to Y’Homa to save its soul.
That would have to wait, however.
This morning Her Majesty had elected to wear gloves.
A Royal Gift
- Banners of Blood -
Mark Alder
“I do not feel like a devil.” But how does a devil feel? The Black Prince, raised among men, thinking himself a man, gazed through the window at Windsor, watching the ladies cut shadows in the long light of the late summer evening. There was Alice Ferrers, slender and graceful, moving along the path as if she floated on a river, the movement of her legs scarcely visible beneath her long skirt. Beside her waddled the stocky Lady Maude of Warwick, thick-legged, arms swinging as if to brush away impeding branches. What if Lady Alice felt lumpen and solid, whereas Lady Maude felt as light as a breeze? Did it change reality? Still they were as they were, their natures unaltered.
The prince took up his looking glass, a gift from his cousin John, Prince of France, friendly enemy. It had been a gift for his coming of age at twelve. Was that some sort of message? No. John would have been too pleased with himself to conceal it. He imagined John saying, “do you see, cousin, do you see? I encourage you to look at yourself. Am I not subtle? Am I not clever?”
He studied his image. A man, handsome like the king, tall, lithe. He altered his attention slightly and looked again at the image in the glass. A devil, as if from a doom painting, horned, its skin slate grey, a tail flicking over its shoulder like a whip.
He had allowed himself to appear like that to one man only—his uncle, the traitor Montagu, on the field of Crecy. Why? The prince had been scared. Montagu, greatest warrior in Christendom, there before him among the slaughter, the blessed sword Arondight shining in his hand. He had sought to intimidate him, even as he'd sunk his sword into the baron’s chest. He wanted his fear, the deference of terror. That was why he'd let him live, rather than finished him. He wanted him to know he had been bested. That was not a devil-like thought.
A devil is a creature of order, a noble servant of God under God’s greatest servant Satan, jailer of the upstart Lucifer. A devil enforces God’s law, punishes those who break it. He could kill Montagu because Montagu was the enemy of the King of England, his master. But to want to elevate himself above him? No. He should not have sought to set himself above a noble, appointed by God, Norman master of the English realm.
He was a devil of Hell. But Hell had given him so little direction. He had heard it whispered that Satan, the jailer of Hell, was an idiot, a brute who allowed his underlings to fight and squabble for his attention. The prince had been set here for a purpose—that much had been revealed to him as a child, when he had taken a fall from his horse. In his sick room, the devils had visited him, beings of fire and teeth, rag-a-bone skeletons who soothed and stroked him. “You are ours. Hell needs you. Await the time.”
Evil is a Matter of Perspective: An Anthology of Antagonists Page 9