“Do you see me objecting?”
“Just don’t go crazy before we get to him, okay?”
“Consider it my gift to you.” What did you say to that? After all, he was pretty sure he was already crazy.
They moved across the floor of the abandoned room like ghosts. Tamerlan frowned at the tracks left in the dust, but if they didn’t find what they were looking for before the tracks were discovered, then tracks would be the least of their worries.
How had Etienne learned to move so quietly? He was a mass of mysteries. A former ruler who could scale walls and sneak through buildings? There was more to his story than Tamerlan could guess. If he was smart, he would have abandoned the former ruler months ago – but how did you tell an ally to leave when he was the only one in the world who wanted the same thing you wanted? Even if that ally clearly hated you?
“The Grandfather is here,” Etienne whispered confidently. “Hold your nerve and we’ll get Marielle out of that clock.”
Tamerlan nodded. Still allies. For now.
He’d been surprised when Etienne had vowed to save Marielle after they both fled H’yi. But he of all people knew that guilt was a powerful motivator.
The door opened without a squeak and they emerged onto a balcony that ran a ring around a huge room below – the main sanctuary of the cathedral. At one end a massive gear-powered clock ticked out the seconds. Rays of light shot dully through the stained glass, highlighting the clock but muted by the rain outside.
In the center of the sanctuary a round stage was set, surrounded by white-robed priests. Around the edge of the balcony, lamps were lit and a massive chandelier hung over the stage. And at the center of the stage, stood a figure in a top hat and cloak. The Grandfather.
Tamerlan’s heart began to race. It was him! He really was there!
They had to get this right.
Could they be seen standing here behind the lights? He could only hope that those below were too focused on what they were doing to look up into the balcony.
Don’t let him see you! One glance and he’ll be gone!
Tamerlan didn’t need Abelmeyer’s warning. Last time he and Etienne had cornered the Grandfather in the middle of a crowded inn, he’d disappeared in the crowd before they could reach him. The time before that, it had been a crowded street and the Grandfather had turned a corner into an alley. They’d only been steps behind him, but when they entered the alley, he had vanished.
Focus! You need us now.
“Prepare to fight,” Etienne whispered in Tamerlan’s ear. “The priests will not give him up without a battle. And we need a hold on him before we use that Eye.”
“We’re going to kill priests?”
He felt shocked but Etienne’s eye roll told him the other man had known this was coming all along.
Tamerlan’s hands shook. And here was the choice. He could smoke and have the skill he needed to fight, or he could try to do this on his own. And either way he might have to kill people – people who had never harmed him and maybe never would. Could he even do that? Did he want to?
You have no training in the sword, Abelmeyer reminded him.
And you don’t have the stomach to kill, Lila chimed in.
You need us. Deathless Pirate sounded gleeful. How else will you use the Eye?
Call us, Alchemist! Call us to your aid!
If nothing else, their eagerness should worry him, shouldn’t it? But what other choice did he have? If he hesitated – or if he tried to fight on his own knowing full well that he didn’t have the skills and might hesitate at the worst possible moment, then all would be lost – these two months of hunting and chasing and working with the man he hated – Etienne. All for nothing.
With shaking hands, he pulled the oilpaper package from his pocket and carefully extracted a single roll of Spices before returning it to safekeeping. He sidled up to a lamp and lit the end of the roll.
“Tsk.” Etienne’s sound conveyed all of his loathing and disapproval in one single sound.
“Do you want to win? Do you want me to use Abelmeyer’s Eye? None of that happens without this.” Tamerlan hissed.
He was doing the wrong thing.
The smoke smelled so good – it called to him like a familiar friend, replacing the scents of dust and old books with a haunting, enchanting smell. A smell that promised to take all his pain and guilt and indecision and hide it away for a while.
This had better work.
He tried not to think about what the cost would be. Blindness. Better not to think of that at all.
Below them, the voices of the priests drifted up.
“There are rumors that the Smudgers have gathered in the Hunsu District in a wide field. All of them. They work on a great spiritual work.”
Who cared what the Smudgers were doing? They’d fled the cities like rats.
He put the roll to his lips and inhaled as much as he could. It surrounded him in puffs of grey and soft purple – an old friend, a fickle lover, a cruel king. The smoke that had haunted him for months was his now, filling his nose and mouth with quivering expectation.
Excitement and anticipation filled him, and he clenched his jaw in pain at the excitement reverberating across the bridge as the Legends battled to take over his body.
Die, Grandfather!
It never got easier. He shook with the passion of the Legend and the last threads of his own control, the Legend’s anticipation mixing with his own expectation to create a feeling as addictive as ambition and as all-consuming as greed.
As the Legend seized his body and used it to climb up onto the railing of the balcony, it was hard not to try to clench his eye shut and scream. It’s a horrible thing to give your future and the fate of your body into the hands of someone you can’t possibly trust.
And it was also the most thrilling release – what happened next was going to be determined by someone else.
Trust me!
Byron Bronzebow! He hadn’t expected that! Abelmeyer had felt the strongest. And he needed Abelmeyer to use the Eye.
I have tricks of my own. Next time, bring a bow. I’m sick of swords.
And then he was leaping from the railing, sailing out with a massive springing jump like an eagle leaping into flight. He sailed out over the sanctuary and caught the cable suspending the chandelier, swinging on it over the assembled priests and scattering hot dripping wax over all of them.
It was glorious. It was perfectly executed. Tamerlan’s breath caught in his throat.
The Grandfather looked up.
Now! Use the Eye now!
Tamerlan dropped through the branches of the chandelier right on top of him.
His feet hit the ground with a smack. But where was the Grandfather? He should have felt the pain of smacking with full force onto the Legend’s back or shoulder. Instead, nothing.
Byron whirled in Tamerlan’s body, trying to see everywhere at once with one eye as he drew his sword, but there was nothing – no one there but stunned priests.
Their shocked expressions bloomed into snarls.
Tamerlan’s heart kicked into high gear as they rushed toward him, drawing their own swords and knives in the whirl of their billowing robes. It was like a bush of roses had come to life to attack him, white petals whirling in the wind of anger.
Byron raised his blade, meeting the first lunge with a fast parry and spinning to the side between two priests. His pursuer couldn’t get a clean swipe at him as the other two closed over his path. The white of their robes rolled in the breeze of their attack.
A fist swung toward him and he dodged the strike, ducking under it. He stabbed quickly, precisely, and a priest fell to the ground, red blossoming over his white robe.
Another spin and he cut down a second priest. A blow clipped the blind side of his head – hard enough to leave it ringing in pain but not hard enough to stop him. He whirled to the side and jabbed his sword in the belly of the man who had hit him.
“Get out of there!�
� Etienne called to him and he looked up from the fray in time to see him on the other side of the room near a small door.
Byron kicked out, striking one of the priests in the gut. As he hunched over in pain, Byron jumped up, stepping on the hunched man and leaping from his bent back to the shoulder of a shocked priest with a sword in each hand. Before the man could react, Byron was spinning into the air in a tucked tumble, sword still in hand.
He was going to skewer them like a lamb for Festival!
But his spinning roll brought them free of the priests, landing beside a cursing Etienne.
“You’re a fool!” the other man spat as they ran through the door.
The guards on the other side turned in confusion at the same time that Byron grabbed the closest one by his collar and bashed his head against the wall. He didn’t see what Etienne did to the other guard – that was his blind side. But he was still side by side with Tamerlan when they met the second pair at the main door.
Tamerlan spun in an arc of destruction, his sword whipping up so quickly that the guards could barely scream before blood spattered the wall and the ceiling and then they were running through the door of the cathedral and out into the downpour.
“He disappeared!” Etienne said between breaths as they ran out into the alley. “You dropped and he was gone before you landed!”
There hadn’t been enough time to use the Eye. Which meant it had all been for nothing.
The smoking.
The killing.
The letting a Legend loose.
His hands were steady as a mountain. The shakes were gone as Byron piloted his body. But at what cost? His heart was sinking faster than a lead weight in the sea.
“Let’s go do some good,” he heard Byron say with his voice. What a load of trash. What good could possibly make up for all the evil done on this stormy day?
6: Queen Mer
Marielle
The smells were returning and with them, her sense of self was returning, too. Every burst of scent was effervescence to her – new life. Hope, perhaps.
She could almost scent her way as she tried to find her path through the tangles of history. The smell of the sea – aquamarine in its tangled scent and enticing in its salty embrace lapped against the Dragonblood Plains. The smell of the rivers and canals grass-green with growing life and thick with the scents of river plants and the fecundity of the rich soil lining the banks led her along. The musky smell of dragons sleeping deep under the rock – or wait now the smell of their musk was up in the air – was like a layer under everything else. A bedrock. The bones of the earth, the skeleton of history. She hadn’t realized how tangled the dragons were with the lives of the people of the Dragonblood Plains until she smelled them under everything. And around everything else, flowing in and through and around was the scent of vanilla and lilac magic swirling in ribbons of turquoise and golden sparkles like a potent drug.
It was all the glorious smells that reminded her that she was Marielle. She was a Scenter. She was pledged to the Windfinders and pledged to justice.
She was not Time.
It was the smells that finally brought back her humanity. That reminded her of her loves and hates, of her attractions and petty irritations – of all the things that made her alive.
She blew through a crowd like the wind on the edge of a rocky seacoast. Alive, but a spirit here as she swam through time.
Ships bobbed in the distance. Around her, anticipation swirled in every whiff of breeze. The scent of cilantro filled the air and spring grass green swirls of color were everywhere. She studied faces. She watched flickers of fear in lightning blue puffs. Spurts of silver certainty. Hope in bronze rolling waves. They painted the crowd like the work of a master.
What time was she in? The clothing of the people was different – older, like her grandfather’s grandfather’s clothing. But the people were the same – the same expressions, the same scents swirling in them, the same feeling of a crowd that was looking to a central figure.
The figure rose up on steps to a makeshift platform and Marielle startled when she realized what she was seeing. That wasn’t ...?
It couldn’t be.
But the scent was all right – exactly as she would have guessed it would be. Power, smelling like gardenias and rolling from this figure in ribbons of royal blue mixed with a residual scent of the turquoise salt of the sea.
She was tall – that was to be expected. And harsh – of course. She had a nose she could have stolen from a hawk – that Marielle wouldn’t have guessed. History had forgotten the nose. But far from her statues, which were always swathed in white and shells, she wore only a simple fisherwoman’s dress. And her hair – far from the flowing locks tangled with starfish and seashells – was cropped around her shoulders in a no-nonsense cut that kept it out of her way.
But glory swirled around her in byzantine purple, swallowing up the blue and turquoise as if this moment was so significant that it dwarfed everything else. It tinged the platform and the crowd and even spread into the distance until all Marielle could see was purple.
The woman began to speak and the crowd fell silent.
“From the sea lies our only hope. A people set apart unaffected by what we do here today. You saw me send the families forth. They will be protected from our choices here.”
What was she talking about? Was she talking about the renowned time in history when Queen Mer sent her people out, telling them to never rest or stop until they found the story that would make sense of everything?
Marielle felt a thrill run up her spine. She was watching history. She was seeing it with her own eyes! But in the history books, Queen Mer hadn’t been a plain fisherwoman with a hawk nose. She’d been a beautiful and glorious queen who sang to the sea and stopped it from raging, who sang to the land and ended the civil wars.
“You judge me for what I did. You say I banished them. You say I sent them to die. But you know just as I do, that we have no other choice. Someone must be saved to live on. And someone must stay to fight. Together – and only together – we can end this constant cycle of civil wars. If we don’t – none of us will be left to feel resentment.”
Someone beside Marielle snarled and she looked at his face – at the garnet rage that rolled off him filling her nose with the scent of pitch.
“There’d be no war without the dragons!” He cried. “No war if they didn’t steal our children!”
The woman with the hawk nose spun to look at him, pointing through the crowd.
“I am one of you! I saw my sister dragged through the streets and hung upside down as they opened her throat to feed the dragon! I fought beside you in the first uprising. And the second. We tore down the Lords. We raised our own. And what did it get us?”
“Choan writhes beneath us!” someone called.
“Yes,” the woman said. “The dragon stirs. Our fate hangs in the balance, yet still, we fight, neighbor fighting neighbor. Homes and livelihoods stolen in the night. But today we change that.”
She pulled something from a sack she was holding – a sack Marielle hadn’t even noticed that she had.
“I took this crown from Lord Y’ni.” The woman lifted the crown up high. Even from here, Marielle could smell the faint traces of blood and violence drifting off the crown. “I cut it from his head while he still lived. I claim it now.”
She jammed the crown on her head, glaring at the crowd as if she dared them to say anything about what she was doing. A chunk of something that looked like dried fur was stuck to one of the points of the crown.
“I am your queen now. Queen Mer of the Sea. And I will end the fighting in the streets and unite you all beneath the tide I bring with me.”
Behind her there was a roar, as tentacles reached up out of the sea, framing the hawk-nosed woman like a crown of the sea. Marielle gasped. The Kratoen! She’d heard rumors of the mighty Kratoen, the creature of the sea enchanted by Queen Mer to do her bidding, but like all other stories, she’d
thought it was only a legend. Yet here he was.
The tentacles curled and snatched at floating wreckage – wreckage that Marielle hadn’t noticed until now. It wasn’t the only one. Had there been a sea battle out on the raging waves? How many ships had sunk to leave that many wrecks behind? And had Queen Mer been the cause of that?
Marielle looked around her. There were no children in the crowd. The people were coated in mud and blood. They carried makeshift weapons. Had there just been a battle here? In the heady feeling of finally scenting again – and of seeing a living moment of history – she hadn’t even noticed the residue of war all around her.
The tentacles disappeared back into the sea with a crash and the spray of the water they smacked as they left misted the crowd.
“I baptize you with my reign. I claim you as my people!”
“What about our daughters and sons? What about their blood?” someone in the crowd yelled. Perhaps that was what they had been fighting about.
“No more will we steal your children,” Queen Mer called out and the roar of the crowd swept up so strongly that the ground beneath Marielle seemed to tremble with it.
“Then how will we bind the dragon?” someone else called when the roar died down.
“From here on, we will purchase any person we take from willing families. Yes, we need the blood of the dragonblooded to keep us safe, but no more will you fear the kidnapping or quelling of your overlords. We will only take the willing – those willing to give themselves.”
But those around Marielle asked the question she wished she could still ask. “Who would be willing?”
But the answer was there a moment later – there in her memory. Who would do it? Anyone who needed a second chance that money could provide.
She tasted bitterness on her tongue at the thought. Lord Mythos claimed that her own mother had been willing to give Marielle’s life to the dragon. And before that, Tamerlan’s father had been willing to give his sister. There was no telling what a person would give for the right price. When wealth greased the wheels to your dreams, no price was too steep for hope.
Bridge of Legends- The Complete Series Page 45