by Shel, Mike
Lying in Geneviva’s plush bed, made up with sumptuous linens, comforters stuffed with goose down, was a desiccated cadaver dressed in the queen’s silken nightclothes. The flesh looked dry, brittle, and more had worn away to reveal the bones beneath. Closed eyelids hid sunken sockets. The triumphant stink of corruption made Ilanda want to scream; she had to purse her lips tightly and hold her breath to keep from allowing it to escape her. This was a corpse, and not a fresh one. She was about to whisper a question to Lady Courlan, standing next to her, when the corpse spoke.
“Ilanda, child? You are here with us?”
Ilanda forced a smile, gripped her folded fan with both hands to hide their trembling. “I am, my queen. I pray I did not keep you waiting long.”
“Her Majesty just called for you, Countess.” Ilanda saw Ulwen now, on the other side of the bed, the crystal orb given him by the old man in his hands; it seemed to her that he held the artifact as he did for the same reason she clutched her fan.
“Ilanda,” rasped the queen again, reaching up with a black-clawed hand more bone than flesh now, bits flaking off as she did so.
With only a moment’s hesitation, Ilanda leaned in over the bed and took the decrepit thing. It felt shockingly cold as its bony digits grasped her own. She swallowed hard so as not to cry out in pain, but the queen’s grip was weak. “I am here, Highness.”
“It seems our expedition,” she began, fighting for breath to speak, “has achieved the ends we desired.”
“What expedition is this?” asked a man at the foot of the bed. Ilanda saw that it was Father Elberlin of the Privy Council. He was not a man who appreciated being left in the dark.
When Ilanda looked back to the queen, her eyelids had retracted, revealing feral crimson irises. She bared her blackened teeth in a bestial sort of sneer. “Ebberin, you will know of our plans when it suits us. Don’t think your black robe and Marcator’s sigil tattooed on your self-important arse gains you unfettered access to our secrets.”
The priest’s grimace showed both pique and fear. He smoothed his graying beard with a shaking hand. “Forgive my presumption, Your Majesty.”
The effort of scolding Elberlin seemed to drain the queen, whose eyelids fluttered shut again, and the grip on Ilanda’s hand weakened further. The others standing on her side of the bed allowed Ilanda to get closer to the queen, so that she no longer had to lean over to keep hold of Geneviva’s hand. It looked as though the queen might speak again, but Elberlin spoke instead.
“Your Highness, I must raise a matter that is…unseemly: the succession. We have not yet consecrated with a public ceremony the successor you named in Marcator’s fane. Only the Priest of Chapters has heard you name him. Will you reveal him to us now, so that we may support your—”
“That Priest of Chapters,” said Geneviva with sudden force, “he covets your post, Ebberin. You’ll keep a close eye on that one, if you are wise.”
Is this the true Geneviva? wondered Ilanda. The one trapped in this corpse? The one Ulwen’s magic bauble revealed? If so, did she name her successor? Or did the monster? It was a thought that hadn’t occurred to her before and it filled her with a new dread.
The queen’s eyes opened again, and her clawed fingers tightened on Ilanda’s hand, a painful, vise-like grip that nearly brought tears to her eyes. “Promise me,” she whispered.
“Anything, Majesty,” Ilanda answered.
“Closer,” said the talking skull atop the queen’s shoulders.
Ilanda leaned in again, bending over the prone cadaver that still drew breath. Her ear hovered an inch above the queen’s blackened teeth, the smell of the grave wafting from them. She remembered the sight of those same rotted gravestones chewing the bleeding flesh of her great grandson and heir, chewing meat that had once been the crown prince.
“The new…monarch,” said the queen in her ear, the words breathy, weak. “You must…respect our decision…all your intelligence, your…wiles…s-serpents and spiders and…s-s-sycophants…plotting. Help Hanifax…”
Ilanda’s heart raced, the stink of decay strong in her nostrils. She suppressed her gorge. “Yes, Geneviva,” she said softly, so that only the queen could hear her, for it seemed the true woman was speaking to her now. “I will support your choice, with all my ability. Whoever shall be king of Hanifax, I will aid his government.”
For a long moment, Ilanda thought it was over, that Geneviva Reges was at last truly dead. But the cadaverous hand tightened painfully on her own, and the queen whispered another word, a haunted gust of wind in her ear. “You.”
Ilanda’s breath caught in her chest. “Your Majesty? I—”
“You,” repeated the dead woman. “You are my successor, Ilanda dear. Be worthy of the crown, as I think you are.”
A long, ragged breath escaped the queen’s desiccated lips, and the light drained from her crimson eyes. The claws holding Ilanda’s hand went limp. Ilanda stood upright again and looked at the crumbling, lifeless thing lying on rich bedsheets. After one hundred and forty-two years on this earth, a hundred and eighteen of them as queen, Geneviva the First, Imperatrix Hanifaxa, Scourge of the Azkayans, was dead.
You. The word echoed in her head. Ilanda, Queen of Hanifax.
Ilanda had to speak with the Aerican. She had to return to her private suite. But first, Ulwen and Elberlin interrogated her: what had the queen whispered to her? What were her final words?
Ilanda hesitated. She knew not why. “She wanted my promise that I would support her choice of a successor.”
“Did she say who it is?” asked the priest of Marcator.
“No.” A lie. Perhaps a foolish one. She wasn’t ready for the world to know.
“Drop the charade, Elberlin,” hissed Ulwen. “Don’t pretend you haven’t peeked at the scrolls.”
Elberlin’s mouth dropped open, genuinely appalled, it seemed, that the Grand Chamberlain would think him capable of such an act. “The scrolls are sacred, Ulwen! I can’t speak for the other cults, but we anointed of Marcator take our oaths seriously! What of the Royal College of Sorcerers? Do you keep to your pledges?”
“Watch how you speak to me, priest!” Ulwen shouted, tapping on the peridot set in his forehead. “We are bound to serve the empire by oaths more potent than any words muttered by your black-robed breed!”
Ilanda excused herself before the two Privy Council members came to blows. She returned to her suite of rooms as if in a dream. The Aerican’s counsel, she needed it. No one alive had ever seen a day when Geneviva Reges was not unquestioned sovereign of Hanifax. Why had Ilanda been chosen? And was it the wise Geneviva, hidden beneath the travesty, who had chosen her? Would she have pledged her fidelity if she had known she was next in line? Ilanda remembered the Aerican’s words: whoever was named Geneviva’s successor would find themselves in immediate peril.
Ruby was at the door when Ilanda arrived, eyes red-rimmed from crying. She thought nothing of it at first, assuming Ruby, too, had been weeping for Lawrence and her father. But then she caught sight of the boy, Ghallo, at the center of her sitting room. It didn’t seem proper, seeing him without the old man, whom he attended like a faithful hound. The boy had been enamored with her from the beginning, and she had been kind to him, not wanting to abuse his childlike devotion. But something was different about him now. What was it? The adoration is gone, she realized.
“Good morning, Ghallo,” she said, putting on a welcoming smile. “But where is your master? I would speak with him.”
“I must tell you most sadly, Countess, that my master did not wake this morning. He has gone on past the Final Veil.”
“Oh!” she exclaimed, holding the folded fan to her brow, her heart sinking. “I am sorry, Ghallo! He was dear to us both.”
A great clutch of deaths! she thought, hiding her despair from the boy. Lawrence, Father, and now the Aerican. The Aerican’s aid taken from me, w
hen it is most needed! Sweet Chaeres, what a loss! She realized only then that she hadn’t included the queen’s demise. It seemed more the lifting of a curse than a death to her. But now, oh! What will I do now? Without the old man’s counsel?
The boy nodded, then spoke again, as though he discerned Ilanda’s unspoken thoughts. “I must tell you a strange thing, Countess. Last night, before falling to sleep forever, my master passed his wisdom on to me. As hard as it might be to believe, I will serve you in the capacity he did, always. I pledge myself to you and your cause.”
If the boy had said something like this before, she would have found it charming, touched his cheek affectionately. Fah, you sweet thing! Fetch me a cup of wine, child! But now, with the flood of events—dreadful news from Harkeny, the passing of the queen, her impending elevation, and now the boy’s strange demeanor—she felt off balance, overwhelmed. Perhaps the boy was in shock. Then she noticed blood drip from the child’s clenched fist.
“Ghallo! Are you injured?”
The boy looked to his hand, opening the palm. “Yes,” he said, almost absently. “I dropped a pitcher when I found my master was dead, and cut myself as I picked up the shattered pieces.” Ruby went to him with a wet cloth to clean the wound. It was shaped like a letter V, an arrowhead pointing up the length of his arm.
“We’ll summon a priest of Belu to tend that,” said Ilanda, snapping her fingers for Baea. “A cut that deep is likely to leave a scar.”
40
The Waters of the Ironbell
The Aretha Dell glided along the waters of the Ironbell, spurred on now by its natural current leading to the sea, rather than the frothing labor of water elementals. Agnes stood apart from Qeelb and Sira, both lost in their own brooding thoughts, and the deckhands who milled about the barge in the course of their duties seemed to know better than to approach her now. She leaned on the starboard rail, eyes fixed on the slowly passing foliage of the rolling green Marburand shoreline, but not seeing it. Instead, her mind was a maelstrom of grief and fury. Her father’s body, wrapped tightly in linens and scented with aromatic spices by a priest of Mictilin for the journey, lay aft, beneath the lean-to near the one she shared with Chalca, who was fast asleep, still weak from his ordeal. She tried to think on a practical matter: whether she would see her father buried at the Citadel, as befitted a Syraeic agent, or deliver him to Lady Hannah in little Daurhim. The baroness would want him to take up residence in the family crypt of the Dyres, alongside her man Belech. But try as she might, Agnes’s thoughts kept returning to the glowing coal of hate that nestled in her heart, fiery and unquenchable. And along with that fury was a deep sense of isolation. She felt abandoned, utterly alone in the world. She touched the jeweled pommel of Szaa’da’shaela. Somehow, the gesture reassured her.
You are right to be angry, Agnes, said the sword, the feminine voice in her head soothing and gentle. But you are not alone. I am with you.
“You’re cold comfort, I’m afraid,” she said aloud with a smirk, earning an awkward glance from a deckhand nearby coiling rope around his forearm. “And I fear our conversations may drive others away.”
Yes, others will not understand. That is one burden we carry, among others. But we will carry them together.
“Others? We carry others?”
Timilis is not the sole source of your grief. That sin has many authors. All of Hanifax has reason to cry out for liberation.
“What do you mean?” she asked, a wariness rising in her.
I mean that Timilis is but one, the sword replied, its tone infinitely reasonable. And the Besh’oul did not visit pain and suffering on you alone, but upon countless millions living about the lands of the Cradle. Not just now—far, far into past centuries, and further. What will you do about that, after you have interred your father at the Citadel?
A tingle danced from the sword up her arm, like an electrical charge. Agnes wasn’t sure what disconcerted her more—Szaa’da’shaela’s prophetic certainty she would see her father buried at the Citadel, or the suggestion that she bore additional responsibility in all this. Her hand slipped off the weapon’s antique hilt and she massaged her still-tingling palm with the other.
Agnes, said the blade, more gently, more reassuring, understand that I will never lie to you. I am yours now to wield. But I have a single, sacred purpose. It is one I cannot fulfill without your heart’s commitment and your hand’s consent. You know that this business…it is not finished. You must be a breaker of idols. You must tear down the icons. Tear down the entire façade, stone by stone.
“How in hell do I do that? Announce in Boudun’s central market that our gods are frauds and con artists, feeding off our suffering? I’d be branded a heretic. They’d pelt me with trash and suspend me in a gibbet in Marcator’s bell tower.”
There is something much more direct you could do to resolve the matter.
“What? Go to the clergy? ‘The gods you serve are thugs and charlatans. Please set aside your lifetime of devotion and dismantle their temples and shrines, if you wouldn’t mind.’”
Agnes. You needn’t convince everyone. Your task is perhaps too obvious and too terrible for your heart to conceive just now.
A cold needle tickled cruelly at Agnes’s heart, and her hand drifted, almost involuntarily, back to Szaa’da’shaela’s pommel. Her fingers wrapped around the grip, and she drew two inches of the blade from its scabbard. Her entire being was engulfed in a warm glow.
You have already slain one false god, Agnes Manteo.
“A sorcerer, who summoned us, who wanted to die,” she answered, voice trembling.
Yes, but with his blood, we have gained many things. I am truly awake now, imbued with great power. I can hide us from them. They won’t see our approach. We’ll catch them unawares in their lair.
“And kill them all,” she said, as though speaking the refrain in some mad liturgy.
Yes, Agnes, we will kill them all. And have our vengeance.
A quick thrill, icy, strangely euphoric, crawled from the sword’s pommel, up her arm and into her chest. Her heart raced. The weapon’s last word—vengeance—it was a rich breath of oxygen on the living coal of anger burning in her breast. Its heat swelled and engulfed her with a sense of terrible strength and purpose. But after a few glorious moments of iron certainty, slivers of doubt crept in.
“Where do they hide? And who will aid us?”
It did not answer. The antique weapon Agnes gripped so tightly was nothing more than forged steel now. She looked around her. The deckhand with his rope was still nearby. He didn’t look at her directly, eyes cast down, but she sensed his wary attention.
Wary of the madwoman talking to her sword, she thought.
Her sword. Was she claiming ownership? Ownership of its burdens along with its powers? Maybe, yes. But could she say she owned it, if it truly was a living thing, an ancient Djao sorcerer transformed into a weapon? Not like Qeelb had been transformed into a weapon. Something quite literal. She couldn’t own the blade. But she could befriend it. Allies, then. Perhaps companions. She closed her eyes and let out a long, slow breath to steady her pulse, galloping wildly in her veins. When she opened her eyelids, nothing had changed: the shoreline still slid by with lazy ease, and the barge drifted down the Ironbell toward the sea. But she was calmer now. A tender breeze, warmed by the afternoon sun, played with her unbound hair, and the tang of the river tickled at her nostrils. She smiled. Then another question occurred to her, more frightening than the others. She bowed her head and whispered it to Szaa’da’shaela, the two of them in private conspiracy.
“What becomes of our world if we succeed?”
But the sword remained silent. Agnes Manteo stood alone again at the rail of a flat-bottomed cargo barge while the swift waters of the Ironbell carried her back home and into the dark and secret future.
Stay Connected!
Visit Mike Shel's we
bsite
www.mikeshel.com
To keep posted, sign up for Mike’s infrequent, sporadically entertaining, spam-free newsletter.
You can also follow Mike on Twitter, Goodreads,
Amazon, and Facebook
Indie authors depend on word of mouth. If you enjoyed this novel, tell your friends and post reviews and ratings at
Amazon.com, Goodreads, and at r/Fantasy.
About the Author
Mike was born in Detroit and raised in Dearborn, Michigan. He has practiced as a psychotherapist for over 20 years. He lives in Indianapolis, Indiana with his wife Tracy, son Leo, and dog Neko. Mike began freelancing for Paizo Publishing's Pathfinder Roleplaying Game in 2010. His first novel, Aching God, was released in 2018. Sin Eater is his second novel. The conclusion of the Iconoclasts trilogy, Idols Fall, is slated for an early 2020 release.