16.
Shirri
Shirri had been watching the street for some time, a small crowd gathering in front of the shattered store windows, peering in, unable or unwilling to step inside for a closer look or to aid the wounded guardsmen—or whoever else was inside. She’d heard screaming from within, sounds resonating out from the shop shortly after her bizarre companions had entered, and … well, she hadn’t much cared to look closer after that. Someone was injured, perhaps dead—Shirri had seen quite enough of that for today—for an entire lifetime, really—and it was scarcely daybreak.
“What do you suppose is happening?” a man in finery asked, his black coat possessed of tails that reached almost to his knees.
“I hear screaming and shouting,” a woman in a very tight corset with a massive hoop skirt answered, unable to keep the delight from her voice. Shirri was wandering closer, possessed of perhaps a little curiosity, and confident that as the crowd kept gathering, she could shelter herself within it. “This is the most exciting thing that’s happened on this block since the last riot!”
Shirri had crossed the street and was only fifty or so feet from the building now. There were probably twenty or even thirty people gathered out front now, shoving a little, the back ranks pushing the front into the building so that someone could report back on what was happening, the front ranks shoving back, unwilling to get too close. Back and forth, the crowd surged, and Shirri kept well clear of it.
A hubbub came from within the building now, a hue and cry above that of the assembling crowd, and Shirri stopped where she stood as the front ranks shoved the back ones into the street, pushing to remove themselves clear of the door as something emerged—
It was the Cyrus Davidon impersonator, some six dirty, wretched women clinging to him and sobbing and crying and screaming to the heavens—or to him, possibly—as he dragged them out, a determined scowl on his broad, handsome face. Shirri had long imagined him—the real him, not this imposter—though she did not perhaps assign quite as much mythological importance to him as most in the city. When she pictured him, she pictured someone more … august, perhaps. More serious. Less … flippant than this imposter.
Oh, certainly, this fellow was muscled. And tall. And wore the armor well. And was handsome, in his way, which was not as ruggedly and obviously handsome as she might have imagined. There was a stunning clarity to the sort of handsome she had envisaged for Cyrus Davidon, and this man lacked that. He was a more subtle kind of handsome, the sort you had to stare at for a while to appreciate. It did not blind in a blast of summer lightning, but perhaps crept up on you and made you think, “Yes, I suppose he is not terrible to look at …”
Not what she’d imagined at all. Which was why, among many other reasons, she was sure that he was not, in fact, Cyrus Davidon.
“Come on, then, ladies,” the Cyrus Davidon impersonator said, dragging himself clear of the front door with his train of women attached all about his person. Three had him by the legs, two clung to his waist and another seem to be climbing his shoulders as though trying to ride him like some sort of upright horse. Even with the woman’s arm locked around his forehead, Shirri could see the scowl of impatience and displeasure at being so thoroughly manhandled—or perhaps womanhandled, in this case. “Off you go.” And he began to shuck them loose, taking care that no injury came to them. “Go back to your homes, your families—wherever.” And he lifted the highest off his shoulders and set her, squirming, upon the cobbled sidewalk.
“I have nowhere to go, my lord! Protect me!” she screamed and hurled herself back at him, wrapping her arms around his neck as he tried to pry loose another. This set loose another round of wretched wailing and clinging as the women tried even harder to hold onto him.
“You, there!” the Cyrus impersonator shouted, voice like a bolt out of the sky, aimed at the man with the long tailcoat. “Help this woman.” And he pulled loose one of the ones at his leg and bodily moved her toward the fellow, who took hold of her arm in surprise.
“Help her … what?” he asked, seemingly stunned. He was blinking furiously, but he maintained his hold on the wailing woman as she fell to her knees trying to get back to the Cyrus impersonator.
“Help her find a place to stay that’s safe,” Cyrus said, pulling loose another from his waist and shoving her toward the stunned woman in the hoop skirt. “And you, too. See that this one is well cared for.”
“I—what?” the woman in the hoop skirt asked as the woman clung to her, fighting for only a second to get back to the Cyrus impersonator before burying her head in the hoop skirt.
“All of you,” the Cyrus impersonator said, “I charge you to help these women.” And he handed off another to a stunned looking factory worker covered in soot who seemed utterly surprised at having a ragged female prisoner pushed at him by a tall man in black armor that was dressed like … well, Him.
Peeling off the last few, the Cyrus impersonator relieved himself of his captive worshippers and pushed them off on waiting members of the crowd who simply stared at him.
“Are you … really him?” asked a teenage girl, stepping out of the stunned crowd.
The Cyrus impersonator paused, and Shirri could see him in profile. The breezy attitude he’d displayed before the battle in the alley was gone. His face was like a thunderhead, and she did not dare get closer, watching as he simmered for a moment, then spun on them.
“I am Cyrus Davidon!” he boomed over the street. People who’d been watching the spectacle from nearby took a step back, a block away they stopped in their tracks. Glancing down the street, she could see that even three blocks away some had paused to look around, such was the volume and fervency of this tall pillar in armor. “This,” and he threw up his thumb at the building behind him, “has been a place of great evil. The Machine, as you call it, takes from people, it takes people, and it chews them up, grinds out everything good, and all in the name of its own power.”
This caused a furious blinking in the crowd, mouths to fall open. “My … my lord …?” the man in the long coattails asked, half bent into a bow already. “What would you have us do?”
“Let the word ring forth from here,” the Cyrus impersonator called—very theatrically, Shirri thought, lending credence to her idea that he was some sort of actor, “that I have returned, and that I am at war with the Machine and anyone who stands with them. If you wish to die, get between me and them. If you wish to live … help me, or help those caught in this Machine’s terrible grasp.”
And with that, he was apparently done and disappeared back inside. Shirri took the opportunity to sidle a little closer to the edge of the crowd, to listen to the reaction that followed.
“I … I think that was actually him,” the man in coattails said, jaw moving up and down slowly even after he’d finished speaking. “He spoke to me. To me!”
“He was so tall,” the woman in the hoop skirt said. “Did you see? It was just as I always heard. Taller than any man I’ve ever seen.”
“He spoke with such fire,” said another, a woman dressed in the simple garments of a textile mill worker. She ran her hands down her heavy sleeves. “I could feel the chills run through me at the sound of his voice.” She shivered. “It was so … resonant.”
“He’s back!” the man in the coattails said again, still holding to the woman the Davidon impersonator had thrown at him. He looked at her now, blinking, as though realizing he’d been given a task. “I—I will see that you are taken great care of, my lady. The best, only, for you.”
She did not hear him, unfortunately, for she was still wailing with hysteria and now burst into sobs on the coattailed man shoulder. He patted her back gingerly.
Shirri, for her part, was left staring as the others entered a sort of conversational circle that reinforced what they’d seen. She thought about stepping in, about being the breath of reason, of criticism, but …
“It was him,” one woman said, one of the captives, wailing with … joy? “
It was truly him … he saved us! He saved us!” And her cries might have reached the heavens, they were so full of elation.
Whatever words of protest she might have offered faded, melted in Shirri’s mouth before they could be born from her lips. And instead she listened with a hard, coarsened heart, as the others sang the praises of a man she knew couldn’t be anything but a fake.
17.
Vaste
“I think I hear a Cyrus Davidon speech,” Vaste said, the staircase moaning beneath his weight as he ascended. He’d gone up so many flights already, and yet this climb seemed interminable, like rising to the top of the tower in Sanctuary of old. At least that was over with. The new Sanctuary had much less climbing, and Vaste was all the happier for it. Provided Cyrus and Vara could learn to shut their damned door.
Vara had paused on the stairwell, just a little ahead of him, her head cocked to one side, listening. “Indeed.”
Vaste watched her as she resumed her upward climb. “Well?”
That prompted a puckering in the lines of her forehead. “Well what?”
“How is it?” Vaste asked. “The speech. You know, graded for its excellence.”
She shrugged lightly as she came around the bannister and into the short hallway at the top of the stairs. Here there was no upper staircase, but instead a ladder that led to a trapdoor. The roof, Vaste suspected. “It’s not bad,” Vara conceded, pausing as she looked at the doors around them. Two were open, two were not. “I give it a three out of five, perhaps. He’s done better.”
“You took all the fire out of him earlier,” Vaste said, catching a glimpse of Curatio moving around, a flash of white robes in one of the doorways.
“Fire is not the problem with this one,” Vara said, thinking it over. “He’s plenty angry. It’s his audience. He does better with fighters, and he’s talking to civilians, and worshippers, no less. They’re positively agape, and he doesn’t know how to handle that.”
“Yes, he’s always done much better with people who hate him,” Vaste agreed. “I think he’s overly attached to putting a sword through people, but that’s less my problem than yours.”
“It saddens me that I’ve reached the point with you that I don’t know whether you’re making a lascivious comment or not,” Vara said, peering in at Curatio and then stepping forward to join him.
“Oh, that wasn’t lascivious at all,” Vaste said. “Lascivious would be—”
“I think I’ve had quite enough of this for one day,” Alaric said as Vara and Vaste entered the room where he’d spied Curatio. The Ghost was standing before a table, back to them but looking over his shoulder. “Between our newlyweds’ refusal to shut a door and your constant banter, I wouldn’t mind letting this rest, at least a little while, as we focus upon other matters.”
“Well, I’m not done, so—holy Cyrus Davidon!” Vaste said, suddenly seeing what waited on the table in front of Alaric.
There was gold, although not an immense quantity. But what the scene lacked in gold pieces, it made up for in jewelry and strange stacks of paper all placed throughout the table. Things were piled on every surface in the room, art and other items that Vaste knew instinctively were the ill-gotten gains of the rabble that ran this place.
“Finally we have your mind on something besides the gutter,” Curatio said with a smile.
“My mind can operate on multiple levels at the same time,” Vaste said. “The gutter is merely the beginning for me. The real challenge is that it’s not as though my audience is going to realize that I can thread my lowbrow humor in with the works of great elven philosophers, so I’m always dragged down to the lowest common denominator. I—oh, who am I kidding? Elven philosophers are boring and self-important.”
“Whereas you are merely self-important,” Vara retorted, “which is why you’re taking it so hard that your good friend has been elevated to godhood while you remain an unknown artist of the smutty joke format.”
“Your words sting me,” Vaste said, frowning. “But I take solace in knowing that your blade does not.”
“For now,” she said, lifting one of the stacks of paper that sat on the table, bound together. It was no more than a few inches long, and a couple wide. She pulled one free. “These look … strangely familiar, though I know I have not seen one like this before.” She held it up, and upon it was the same face that Vaste had seen on the statue next to Cyrus’s.
“That’s the Lord Protector of Reikonos,” Vaste said, taking it from her hand and looking at it. “Lots of watermarking and funny writing on this.” He flipped it over to find a stamped picture of the Citadel upon the back. “What the hell is this?”
“It looks a lot like those notes of currency that one of my bankers in Termina used to try and foist off on me,” Cyrus said, entering the room, his brow down in a scowl that only lightened minutely when he saw Vara. It was a subtle thing, probably one the warrior didn’t even realize happened, Vaste observed. At one point it had made him coo with amusement to see the fiercest warrior in all the land go all smitten and doe-eyed—or as close as he got—over the fiercest paladin in the history of all history …
But now it just left him cold, and he turned away.
“I thought it was something of a joke, the idea of paper money replacing real gold you could hold in your hand,” Cyrus said, taking up the paper from Vaste. Vaste gave him an annoyed look; it had been snatched so quickly, and without so much as a by-your-leave before he took it. “I never figured it would catch on, but judging by this place …” The warrior tossed down the paper, not even bothering to hand it back to Vaste. How rude. And typical.
“It would appear it was an idea ahead of its time,” Alaric said, also frowning. “But there is still gold.”
“Indeed,” Curatio said. “Nothing could ever replace the feeling of a solid coinpurse clanking against your side as you walk.”
“Clanking against what on you, exactly?” Vaste asked with a frown of his own. “You’re a healer, you don’t wear armor.”
Curatio lifted his robes to reveal a fine layer of mail at his ankles. “Now that it’s no longer heresy … you really should get some of your own. And perhaps a nice mace, too.”
“I have a staff that splits open heads faster than Cyrus can devour a beef cutlet,” Vaste said. “Keep your damned mace.”
“I assure you, if I had no regard for table manners, I could eat beef faster,” Cyrus said.
“Darling, you already have little regard for table manners,” Vara said, sotto voce.
“Yes, but I said ‘no regard,’” Cyrus said. “It’s a fine distinction, but—”
“Shirri’s mother is not here,” Alaric said, head bowed as he stared at the purloined goods around the room and the pile of monies upon the table before him.
“No,” Vara said. “We have checked every room and the basement. This house is one half barracks for these thugs, and one half prison house for … whomever this Machine desires. But her mother is not among the captives, unless she was hiding among the dirty women flinging themselves upon Cyrus.”
“A common occurrence through the years, as I recall,” Vaste said, drawing an ireful look from Alaric. “What? I make no promises; if a choice witticism passes that involves vulgarity, you cannot expect me to pass on it as though it were a salad.”
“Especially when it rings so heartily true,” Vara said, drawing a wounded look from Cyrus. “Sorry,” she whispered to him, “but it really was simply too good to pass up.”
“All this silliness aside, we are no closer to our goal than when we arrived at this place,” Alaric said. “Many lie dead in these halls, but we have come no closer to—”
“That youth that you tried to set on the right path,” Cyrus said, clearing his throat. “He suggested something about a coal yard on Market Street being the next nearest or most logical place to keep a kidnapping victim?”
Alaric paused, pensive. “Yes, you are right. A thin thread, but a thread nonetheless. I suppose we must move o
nward.”
“If I may,” Vara said, holding position as the others started to move. “Before we leave, I suggest two courses of action.”
“And they are?” Alaric asked, with a stiffness of his own. It was plain to Vaste that something was brewing beneath the surface of the Ghost’s mind.
“First, we throw all this out the window to the crowd below,” Vara said, nodding at the nearby windows. “Enrich them at cost to this Machine.”
“An excellent suggestion,” Curatio said, “and one that will surely please Cyrus’s assembled legion of worshippers below.” The warrior let his eyes roll irritably at the healer’s comment, but did not reply.
“And second, we set fire to this building and let it burn,” Vara said, almost standing at attention.
That drew a moment of silence. “Yay,” Vaste said, “we’re going to set fire to this tinderbox of a city. I am highly in favor of this plan, because anyone who worships Cyrus Davidon as their gods needs to be purged from the very surface of the earth with scourging fire. Good thinking.” He clapped Vara on the shoulder.
She sent him an acid look. “The air is wet; rain is on the horizon. The fire will likely not have much chance to get out of control, but it will deny this place as a safe haven to this Machine. We should treat all such properties of theirs thusly, and send them a message that their secret leaders will receive loudly and with great clarity.”
“‘Your money will be stolen and all your other shit will be burned,’” Vaste said, “‘Signed, Sincerely, Other Criminals Who Wish to Steal From You And Burn Your Shit.’”
Alaric let out a soft guffaw, most unexpectedly, before composing himself. “I think Vara is right. I think that will send a necessary message about what is happening in this town now that we have arrived.”
Ghosts of Sanctuary Page 13