Beneath the Keep

by Erika Johansen

  One, then two more Blue Horizon crept out of the dusk. The Cadarese must have been counting as well, because when the last one arrived, the Cadarese disappeared inside, leaving the other man on the door.

  “One guard,” Lisk whispered. His tone was marveling, almost awed, and for once, Thorne agreed with him. One guard, for so great a prize . . . it was madness. But then the Blue Horizon were mad, all of them, made lunatic by their ridiculous overconfidence in the ghost of William Tear, in his better world. It was a pity that Thorne had to deal with these fools topside, for a good stint in the Creche would have sorted them out nicely, taught them that there was no better world, no moment of revelation, only the black grasp of greed beneath every open and extended hand. The children of the tunnels knew that. They absorbed it before they even learned to walk.

  “I’m going,” Lisk told them. “We’ll be back within ten minutes. Send the witch if anything goes wrong.”

  Thorne nodded, though he sensed Brenna’s chilly displeasure behind him. Lisk legged his way out of the rubbish cubicle and was gone down the adjoining alley.

  “When the Caden tire of him, I will give him to you,” Thorne told Brenna, and her dead chuckle echoed briefly in the tiny space.

  “Should we not be going, master?” she asked, a few minutes later. “That fool has the operation well in hand, and if something goes wrong—”

  “Will something go wrong?”

  She hissed angrily. “No. But we did not come this far by throwing caution to the winds.”

  “A few minutes more. Lisk will do the job, yes. I just want to make sure of it. We need no surprises with the Holy Father now.”

  They did not have long to wait. In short order, the man on the mead-hall door fell soundlessly to the ground, a knife in his throat, and a group of ten Caden, dressed in unobtrusive grey, emerged into the road, pushing two wagons ahead of them. Unless Lisk was a complete incompetent—and, Thorne reluctantly had to admit, he probably wasn’t—another ten Caden were now one street over, at the back door of the mead hall. The grey-clad assassins kicked the dead guard out of the way as they pushed the wagons up against the twin doors, and one of them went to work with a set of chains.

  “We should go, master, now.”

  Brenna’s voice was threaded with anxiety. Thorne ignored her, watching as the Caden finished chaining the doors and moved back. Now two more darted forward and tossed torches into the beds of the wagons, where piles of excelsior waited, like sleeping fireworks . . . like the revolution the Blue Horizon pursued so hopelessly. Thorne regretted the imminent death of the Fetch, who was undoubtedly a clever man, ruthless and efficient, not balking at the things that needed to be done. But he was foolish, so damnably foolish, infected with the fever dream of the better world.

  “Master, please.”

  Thorne turned a bemused look on Brenna. All of her earlier serenity had melted away; now she looked as nervous as a cat on a grate.

  “What is it?”

  “Nothing, master. I just . . . I do not like uncertainties. If there is something I have not seen—”

  “You see everything, dearest,” he replied absently, watching the flames lick at the wagon.

  “No. I do not.”

  “Is this about the baby again?” he asked, exasperated. “Of course you can’t see it. It’s the size of a fucking slug.”

  “Master, please, listen to me. I see nothing. Nothing at all. I should have it fixed by now. I should know the sex, the father, the future—”

  “Calm yourself,” he said shortly, for her voice was rising to a dangerous level, and her sudden loss of confidence was feeding Thorne’s own anxiety. The damnable baby had been no part of the plan; news of Elyssa’s pregnancy had literally shocked Brenna into silence. The child was hidden, Brenna said, as though that explained everything . . . as though it could explain how Thorne’s seer, who had never once failed to come up with the goods, was suddenly blind. She could not say with certainty who the father was—though even an idiot would know that it wasn’t the hapless guard Mhurn, who had been thrown from the Keep last week like a sacrificial lamb—or what the child would become, or even whether it would be male or female. What good was prophecy, Thorne wondered, if it ceased to function when he needed it most?

  The Caden had vanished now, quickly and quietly. The fire had consumed the wagon and begun spreading, climbing the dry-rotted walls of the mead hall like snakes scaling a fort. Smoke drifted into the dusky sky. Several minutes later, the first cry came from inside the building: someone raising an alarm.

  “Shout all you like,” Thorne murmured. “It will not help you.”

  The chained doors began to rattle. Screams echoed inside: men or women, who could tell, for panic had robbed them of anything but fear.

  “Master, please!” Brenna begged, and her voice had tears in it. “Master, please! I can feel them! Please!”

  Thorne, sensing Brenna approaching a complete loss of control, nodded and helped her up. The screams had multiplied into an endless cacophony. The entire building was aflame now, fire eating into the walls, a bright and hungry animal against the deep blue of the early-evening sky. High above Thorne’s head, a figure crashed through one of the upper windows, spraying a storm of glass that sparkled orange in the reflected light of the flames. The figure seemed to pause in midair for a moment, then plummeted some sixty feet to the ground. This body was followed by another, and still another; they hit the pavement with bloody impacts that could be heard even over the flames and the assembled crowd’s shrieks of horror. They had chosen a quicker death, a cleaner death, and Thorne could understand that . . . could even admire it. Regret assailed him again, as it so often did over things that could not be changed. The Blue Horizon would be broken, and that was a good thing, an efficient thing, for now things could move forward. But even so, Thorne regretted the conflagration before him. As he and Brenna rounded the corner, leaving the sound of screams behind, it occurred to Thorne that fire was a fine metaphor for revolution itself . . . revolution, which took so much effort that could have been expended in something useful. Revolution, which was invariably snuffed out.

  What a waste, Thorne thought. He did not look back, only tucked Brenna’s arm through his as they strolled up the street toward the new offices. A troop of fire marshals ran past them, and Thorne almost laughed. There was no water anymore; the marshals’ cistern, like all of those in the city, had been confiscated for drinking. In this new, dry world, one could not fight fire, any more than one could compel rain.

  Chapter 24

  THE RED DEATH

  Even in a line riddled with weakness and mental instability, Elyssa Raleigh remains a puzzle. What happened to her, this brave child who regularly deviled her autocratic mother, who preached socialism, who stood in front of the masses and pledged her throne to the Blue Horizon? How did the strong-willed Princess Elyssa become the infamous Shipper Queen? This transformation, more than anything else, suggests that something monstrous was hidden in plain sight at the Raleigh court.

  —Megalomania and Madness: A History of the Raleigh Line in the Pre-Glynn Era, Emily Skaff

  Niya was prepared to have a terrible time at the Queen’s birthday party. She had bathed and dressed resentfully—her best gown, a green velvet—and done her hair in five auburn braids. She looked very well in the glass, but inside she was a bundle of misgiving, and once they reached the Queen’s ballroom, she found that her misgiving was well justified.

  The room had been decorated to the hilt. Bunting in bright colors hung between the pillars, and new tapestry lined the walls. Here and there, naked human statues adorned the room, and though Niya had little modesty to speak of, she still found her conscience offended. In the hour they had been here, she had already seen dancing girls covered in veils and not much else, several dogs that had been trained to behave in concert, even a troupe of mimes . . . wholly irritating, but then,
Niya had never known mimes to be anything else. Two tame peacocks, birthday gifts to Arla from the King of Cadare, strutted around the room.

  But the entertainment was nothing compared to the food. The edges of the huge ballroom were lined with an endless border of tables, their surfaces covered in so much meat that Niya’s stomach turned at the sight of it. Venison, beef, fish, boar, chicken, lamb, pork, and an unidentifiable substance that Niya finally discovered to be rattlesnake. All of the cattle herds had died; Niya could only assume that Arla had been feeding a private herd from the Crown stores. Where she had gotten the rest of the meat, Niya wouldn’t even hazard a guess. The alcohol was more excessive still, with twelve huge tables allotted to hold nothing but kegs and bottles, and on smaller tables lay a buffet of breads and even more varieties of pastry, ten tureens filled with various soups, and a seemingly limitless number of side dishes: rice, potatoes, corn, stewed apples, minced pie.

  They haven’t even brought out the desserts yet, Niya thought numbly. In the Almont, tenants were dying, even killing each other, for the reward of a few apples or a basket of pumpkin seeds. Children were being hanged for stealing, and several whole villages had already been put to the torch in retaliation. The sight of all this food—the callousness it represented—staggered Niya. The sickness in her stomach was nothing compared to the upset in her head.

  Elyssa was eating heartily, and Niya supposed she might well; she would be some three months along now. She was drinking too, and heavily . . . a fact that only Niya seemed to note. But really, who would say anything? Who would question the heir to the throne? Only Arla could check Elyssa, and Arla would not. Arla was pleased as punch about Elyssa’s pregnancy, the continuation of the line . . . though Niya often wondered whether she would have been half so pleased if Elyssa had not first denounced the Blue Horizon.

  All of our plans, Niya thought, her still face giving no clue of the despair that lay behind. All of our plans, our hopes . . . all of it, wrecked in a single instant. What am I still doing here? I should have left the Keep long ago.

  But those had not been her orders. She had not heard from the Fetch since Elyssa’s proclamation had gone out. On the day he told her to leave the Keep, she would, and gladly, but until then she was stuck in this vast room, surrounded by these horrible people.

  She consoled herself with the thought that Arliss would be here later. Arliss had already begun to find his own odd entrée into court, wangling invitations from longtime clients. Tonight it was Lady Milford. The court maintained the polite fiction that Lady Milford was slowly wasting away of old age, but the lady was only fifty-two, her pallor and ruined heart the result of a late-stage poppy habit. In the better world, the sale of narcotics would be anathema, but Niya could not bring herself to dislike Arliss, who had an endearingly filthy sense of humor as well as a seemingly endless source of informants in the Gut. But he hadn’t arrived yet. A strong whiff of slow-cooked pork assaulted Niya’s nostrils, nearly making her ill.

  “Can I get you some more wine, lady?”

  Niya turned, bemused, and found a servant standing before her: a young man, his eyes lit with admiration; he had taken her for a noblewoman. Niya waved him off, returning her attention to Elyssa, who stood laughing several feet away, in a conversational cluster that included Lady Bennis and Lord Tare. As Niya watched, Elyssa downed yet another shot of whiskey.

  Does she wish to kill the baby in the womb?

  A month before, such a question would have been unthinkable, but oh, how things had changed. Niya found herself suddenly terrified for the tiny clump of cells behind the wall of Elyssa’s abdomen . . . a terror that had no clear shape. Despite Givens’s careful instruction to the Guard and the staff of the Queen’s Wing that Mhurn was the father of the baby, Niya knew better. In the clumsy ejection of Mhurn from the Keep, Niya sensed panic: Arla’s desperation to convince the Holy Father that the future heir to the throne was not a child of the Blue Horizon. Something had happened to Gareth; the entire movement knew it now, though they didn’t speak of it. Gareth was the only one who might have been capable of rallying them, even in the wake of Elyssa’s terrible proclamation . . . but he was gone, and the heart of the Blue Horizon had gone with him.

  Near the far wall was Queen Arla, easily visible because of the red dress she wore: Elyssa’s present, a bright combination of silk and satin, hung with fine wisps of muslin. Even Niya had to admit that the dress was beautiful, but the sight of it angered her as well, for the dress had cost enough gold to give a solid meal to half the beggars in New London. Niya knew nothing of sorcery—would not even have believed, a few months before, that sorcery existed—but she could no longer deny that Elston and Barty and the rest were right: Elyssa had been witched. There was no other explanation for the utter reversal of personality, for what she had done. In Niya’s last message to the Fetch, she had told him the plain truth: they must kill the seer.

  But she had not yet heard back.

  A popping noise distracted her: Mace, the farm boy who was not a farm boy, stood only a few feet away, cracking his knuckles. He was big and broad, dark-haired, with long legs held constantly in the slightly bent-kneed posture of a man always at the ready for a fight. His face might have been handsome, were it not so truculent.

  “You’re studying me,” Mace remarked, never taking his eyes from Elyssa.

  “Indeed. Books with closed covers are the most interesting.”

  A roar came from the assembled company; someone had proposed a toast to Queen Arla’s health. Prince Thomas had materialized from somewhere and now hung around the edge of the Queen’s entourage, peeping hopefully at his mother. But the vague outline of rapist was still visible on his forehead, and the Queen did not deign to notice him. Elyssa was speaking to Lady Willis; a nice enough woman who would never win any prize for brains, and beside her—

  Niya’s breath caught. Sometime in the last few minutes, Arlen Thorne had joined Elyssa, and now his arm supported hers, while his other hand held a glass of champagne. Mace had noticed as well; his posture was tense, his eyes fixed on the pimp. But when Niya looked around wildly, seeking that broad tightening of the Guard that always occurred when dangerous people visited the Keep, she saw nothing.

  My God, they don’t know who he is! Niya realized, shocked. Not knowing Arlen Thorne . . . to a denizen of the Gut, it would be like not knowing Lucifer himself. Thorne listened politely as Elyssa spoke, and Niya wondered that no one could see the contempt in his eyes, the sneer that hid just beneath the curve of his mouth. Or did her own mind do that?

  “Vermin in the Keep,” Mace murmured beside her. “Just as I always heard.”

  She glanced sharply at him. “You know that man?”

  “Yes, and so do you, because we grew up far, far from here. But the throne surrounds itself with like. It’s a weakness in the Guard.”

  “You’re no guard,” Niya stated flatly.

  “No, Mistress Niya. No more than you’re a lady’s maid.”

  A man’s thick, bellowing laugh echoed over the gathering; Niya could feel its vibrations in the floor. Cardinal Bannon, his white robes billowing around him, seemed determined to drink the entire ocean of whiskey that Arla had laid in for the occasion. Niya watched the priest without expression, hiding the faceless, impersonal hate she always felt whenever she beheld a frock. Near Elyssa, one noble had set his plate on the ground, the crowd around him laughing as the trained dogs licked up the leavings, and Niya suddenly asked the Mace, “Do you know Poe?”

  “Poe?” Mace repeated, sounding genuinely bewildered.

  “The writer.”

  “No,” Mace replied, after a long pause. “I don’t know him.”

  Niya knew that she should shut up, as a girl of her supposed background would never have had access to books. But it was too late; she was already speaking, bitterness flowing through her voice. “He speaks of just such a scene as we see here: ex
cess within, misery without. Look at those tables: a glut of food, in a time of famine. Thus does the Queen reassure herself, and all of these other pit vipers, that the misery will remain without.”

  “It will,” Mace replied, seeming not at all perturbed by her outburst. “Surely the Queen has enough food to last her until the end times.”

  “And that makes it all right?”

  “That’s not what I said.”

  Niya waited for him to speak again, but he didn’t. They stood for some moments in silence, a silence that was strangely peaceable, until Mace asked, “Do you know that man? The one with the widow’s peak and the purple clothes?”

  Following his gaze, Niya nodded. “Lord Tennant. What of him?”

  “The tattoo on his hand. It interests me.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s such an unfortunate choice. Clowns are meant to delight children.”

  Niya blinked. The Blue Horizon knew about the clowns; they had already caught and slaughtered two of them in the Gut, and Tennant was next on the list. But how could Mace know that?

  “Niya. You’re not drinking.”

  Niya started; Elyssa had materialized beside her. Once upon a time they had been friends, but now Elyssa’s smile was only that of a party acquaintance, making small talk. The sight wounded Niya, but she had spent her life dissembling, and she did not let it show.

  “Highness. Your present to your mother is a roaring success.”

  Elyssa did not reply. Niya was aware of the guards subtly relocating, re-forming the circle around them, not coming too close in case Elyssa intended private conversation. But Elyssa merely stood there, clutching her champagne glass . . . too tightly, Niya thought. Elyssa’s knuckles stood out, anguished, white as bone.