Chapter XVII
In Defense of the Gods
High Bashti: Winter 24
I
Twenty-five days after their departure from High Bashti, the expedition returned.
Once back across the Silver, they had seen mostly local traffic on Thyme Street and on the river—few wagons full of fruit, vegetables, and grain bound westward toward the capital, few herds of swine or cattle, few laden barges.
“We hear stories,” said the innkeeper darkly when they stopped to water their horses and to drink warm cinnamon cider at his wayside hostelry. “The city is in chaos, the Council against the king, the king against the citizens. Everyone is fighting. Food is short. So is money. If supplies go in and aren’t heavily guarded, one faction or the other seizes them. So we stay here, safe. We hope. The gods only know where it will all end.”
The travelers entered the Necropolis at sunset. Skeins of smoke drifted under the now skeletal trees and wreathed the monuments, here draped over a marble neck, there flowing around the flanks of a stone lion. On the ground below, fumble-fingers of mist shifted through the fallen leaves of autumn, stirred by a fitful breeze.
Here was the Tigganis sanctum, mostly rebuilt. On its threshold crouched the suggestion of a misshapen figure, perhaps the late Lord Prestic, animated by love and by vengeance? Not dead. Not alive. Where did he belong? So many questions remained unanswered.
Beyond the crypts, within the outer city wall, was the Thyme river valley. It had been a vast garden. Now it was not so much harvested as stripped.
And then there was High Bashti.
With sunset, the shadows of the Snowthorns lay over it, and with these came a distant rack of clouds laced with lightning, shaken with muted thunder. The wind turned. Now the breath of fire gusted in the riders’ faces, rising from dozens of lesser conflagrations within the city. Lights flared here and there, painting this wall or that, then sank, then leaped again, untended. A growl of many voices rose from the forum. More fires there cast a ruddy glow on the watching statues of the gods, on the surrounding buildings including the ornate façade of General Suwaeton’s temple.
The Kencyr regarded all of this from afar.
“No,” said Harn, in answer to Jame’s questioning look. “Before we go there, we have to find out what’s happening.”
With that, they rode through the looted fields to the main gate, through that into the smoldering city.
II
“. . . and then,” said Lady Anthea, “Mordaunt stopped the dole. And so, of course, the citizens revolted.”
Jame and Harn were in her apartment at Campus Kencyrath, along with the randon officer whom Harn had left in charge of the garrison.
“The urchins are our eyes and ears in the city,” the latter had explained. “Snaggles captains them. They report to him, he reports to the lady, and she, graciously, shares that information with us. So does your agent Graykin, although not as regularly, nor do I trust him as much.”
“Let me get this straight,” said Harn, and began to count on his fingers. “Mordaunt demands more money from the Council. They say no. He raids the dole fund, depleting it. The citizens riot. The Council sends the city guards to help them. Mordaunt declares martial law and calls in the army as well as his ruffians, led by Jurik. He also draws on us to protect him, personally, which is where most of our troops are right now, on the palace mound. Meanwhile, there’s widespread looting and arson. And you, lady, open our campus as a refuge for those citizens fleeing the violence, rooms, halls, steps, arena and all. You think I didn’t notice that they’re using our fences and furniture for firewood? Go on, tell me: Have I missed anything?”
Anthea’s wrinkled lips twitched into a smile. “One does what one can.”
“How are we feeding them, by the way?”
“By my patrimony and by the thieves’ market. What, you didn’t know that I am one of the richest women in the city?”
The door burst open and Snaggles tumbled in, exclaiming, “It’s gotten worse!”
Mordaunt’s ruffians and the army had seized the major temples in the forum, he reported. City guards had tried to take them back, but the king’s forces threatened to destroy the deified bodies within if they persisted, also if the Council didn’t pay Mordaunt what he demanded by midnight. Then they would go after the domestic saints. They were, in effect, holding the entire Pantheon hostage.
“What, even General Suwaeton?” Rue asked.
“Especially him.”
“Mordaunt hates and fears his grandfather,” said Jame, thinking out-loud. “Whatever he’s planning, it involves Suwaeton’s destruction.”
Why, though, should she care? These gods had virtually nothing to do with the Kencyrath. They predated even the Four in their archetypes, although not in the individuals who currently enacted them. Yes, that latter change seemed to have coincided with the activation of the Kencyr temples, but their current power pertained wholly to Rathillien. Maybe that was it: this world needed all of its souls to oppose Perimal Darkling. To lose the Central Lands Council of Gods, especially its king, would weaken it, perhaps fatally. That must be forestalled at all costs.
Besides, she liked the man.
Jame stood up. “I’m going back to the forum,” she said. “What I can do there, I don’t know, but I have to do something.”
After a quick visit to her quarters through hallways jammed with fugitives, she, Rue, and Damson left. Harn and the rest of the garrison went part way with them, then turned west toward the palace to check on the Knorth troops there. A clutch of civilian guards drawn from among the refugees remained to protect the campus on what promised to be a turbulent night.
Storm clouds rolled closer, lightning flickering in their bowels. Thunder cleared its throat.
On the way in, the expedition had skirted the forum on back streets to its north, between the Tigganis mount and that to the north, nameless, abandoned, blasted. Now Jame and her small company took a more familiar route southward between the Floten and the Tigganis hills. Here was the market reduced to ashes, circled by frantic pigeons. Then there were the apartment buildings with smoking roofs, their bottom stories on fire. Citizens crowded the street between them with their families and possessions. Dogs ran in circles, barking. Children cried. Parents looked distraught. High Bashti was falling apart.
“This is not good,” said Jame.
“Well,” Snaggles said. “what are you going to do about it?”
By now they were in charred Thyme Side, not far from where the Guild fire had started. The urchin made Jame jump as he popped up at her elbow.
“What are you doing here?” she demanded.
“It’s my city, isn’t it? Followed you, didn’t I?”
“Apparently. Now keep out of our way.”
They arrived at the forum, which seethed with people.
Mordaunt’s ruffians and random elements of the army held the temples, fending off the growing crowd. Jame recognized Jurik strutting behind the lines before Suwaeton’s sanctuary, loomed over by the broad, simpering thug already familiar to her from past encounters. Both, as Harn had said, were bedecked to the eyebrows in lace, sequins, and glitter. Less gaudy, compared to the rest, was Jurik’s perennial golden brow band, now shoved back on a sweaty forehead, barely a cover for his receding hairline.
Oh, little boy, she thought. Will you ever grow up?
One of the army detachments was Danior from Nether Bashti, looking disgusted. Jurik paused, apparently to give them orders. If so, they showed no sign of having heard him.
The city guards faced these troops but held back due to the threat that the latter posed to Bashti’s gods. Citizens piled up behind them, more and more filling the forum as the midnight deadline approached. Standards waved as they had on Autumn’s Eve, beacons to the faithful of each house. The threatened, after all, were not only deities but family. Some began defiantly to sing:
“What is, will be.
We are the heart of this world.
Our ways endure.”
But an armed legion stood before them with its hand, as it were, at their throats.
“How do we get in?” asked Damson.
Snaggles tugged Jame’s sleeve. “There’s a side door especially for priests.”
One by one, they angled through the crowd, then darted between the front lines, then passed between Suwaeton’s Floten temple to the right and the Tigganis to the left. The Danior commander saw Jame, but looked the other way, her troops likewise. Jurik didn’t notice.
Here was the door, or so Snaggles said. It was almost indistinguishable from the wall, and locked. Jame extended a claw to pick it open, to Snaggles’ avid interest. The mechanism within clicked. They crept inside.
The interior was as elaborate as Jame remembered—room after room of votive offerings, shining stone floors, thick columns, walls adorned with tapestries and murals, high ceilings inlayed with mosaics.
At first it seemed to be deserted. Then they heard the murmur of a voice echoing through the halls. It wheedled. It cajoled. It was utterly, smugly, self-confident.
Believe in me, its tone said, under whatever words it spoke. I alone know what you truly want and can give it to you.
Jame shivered.
This seduction was what she had always most feared, this call to the unfallen, uncertain darkling within her, to what had betrayed her mother. To yield. To belong.
But she was no longer a child huddled alone in a lightless room, listening to darkness speak.
Now it was the king of the gods who lay helplessly coffined within.
They followed the voice, up and up internal steps, to the inner sanctum. There was the General’s rock crystal sarcophagus on its altar, its lid slid off and lying shattered on the floor. Over it bent a pale figure. Smiling waxen lips spoke, but did not move.
“I ask such a little thing from you,” they murmured, with the lilt of light-hearted enticement. “You will not even miss it. Only your soul, freely given to me. Admit: it has always burdened you. The weight. The responsibility. Why continue to carry it? You are dead. You long for oblivion. You know you do. If not this way, well, your soul will be set free from this carrion mass regardless. With fire. Look.”
He waved a languid gloved hand toward the back of the room. There stood a half dozen of the Deathless in white robes with featureless waxen masks. In their hands were oil jugs and glowing fire pots, which they raised in salutation or in menace.
“Oblivion or immortality. Choose.”
“Which is which?” Jame asked, stepping forward, dry mouthed.
The smiling mask raised to regard her through the black holes of its eyes.
“I am immortal. All who oppose me die. You still have that choice, little girl, even after all the times that you have disappointed me.”
Jame gulped. “I don’t accept that. Even so, I would rather be dead than be what you are.”
The smiling mask seemed to laugh.
“Power,” it said. “Immortality. Final victory over Perimal Darkling. Yes, I oppose the Shadows. They would swallow me.”
“You bowed to them.”
“But I never crawled before them. I am greater than that. I am omnipotent.”
“Gerridon. Uncle. I will not call you Master of Knorth again, for you are delusional. The souls you fed upon are gone. You have failed to harvest new ones. Like the shadow assassins, you can kill but not reap without consent. Have you not found that so here, in your court of last resort?”
He rose. She hadn’t realized that he was so tall—enough, it seemed, almost to scrap the ceiling. Wisps of luminous mist writhed about his unseen feet and swirled up his pale robes as they had in the White Hills. They looked almost like weirding. Oh, chilling thought: Had she been wrong about his current access to power?
“Never say that I am finished,” he said, looking down his nose at her as if from a great height. His mask cracked at one corner. It appeared to sneer and then, in a trickle, to bleed. “Never dream it. More souls await me among our own kind than you or your hapless brother can count. He will fall. So will you. So will that weakling whom perforce I must call my son. I say again, wait.” He drew up his cloak. “This conversation no longer amuses me.”
Again he gestured to the Deathless, and they advanced.
Damson dived at the nearest, knocking him sideways into his fellow. Oil splashed from the former’s vessel onto the latter’s robe, into his fire pot. Flames enveloped them both and spread. Rue yelped. Damson watched with speculative eyes, as she had done at Vont’s pyre, until Jame pulled her back. Robe after robe kindled and the Deathless floundered about the room, beating at themselves, setting fire to the tapestries. Cloth blackened and fell. Beneath it was—nothing, until skin charred and mere ink boiled away from seared flesh.
“They’re shadow assassins!” Snaggles cried, almost in tears. Jame remembered that he had expressed admiration for the Deathless, who promised eternal life to all classes.
“Not all of them,” she said. Malapirt came to mind, although he would probably not have welcomed someone like this grubby urchin into his brotherhood, any more than the so-called Master aspired to immortality for everyone.
Fire climbed the walls to the rafters and licked across the floor. Shimmering veils of heat rose.
Gerridon had disappeared. If he really had stood on a patch of weirding, he could potentially go anywhere.
Suwaeton’s body remained.
“We have to get him out of here,” Jame said, a sleeve raised to protect her face from the scorching heat.
Her first thought was that the General could be resealed in his sarcophagus, but the lid was broken. Besides, if the fire spread the heat might bake him inside like a ham.
Rafters began to crack and fall. Mosaics shattered, tiles crashing down in a many-colored rain. Below, rich offerings burned or melted.
Snaggles tugged her sleeve again. “There’s a garden behind the temple.”
“Right. Damson, Rue, help me.”
They lifted the General’s corpse out of its coffin. It was limp, which they hadn’t expected, but heavy. He might have been sleeping. One almost expected to hear him snore. The side door remained open. They carried the body through it, back into the autumn-swept garden where they laid him under a tree and buried him in a mound of fallen foliage.
Leaving, at the temple’s front they found their way blocked by Jurik and his brigands.
“Always in the thick of things, I see,” he said, with a smirk. “Shall we explain this to my father? I think so.”
Damson stepped forward, pugnacious, but Jame held her back. “I meant to visit Mordaunt next anyway,” she said. “Let’s see how that goes.”
Smoke began to boil out from under the temple’s eaves. People noticed.
III
Jurik and his thugs hustled them back to the palace mound, pushing, shoving, sneering. One of them tried to cuff Snaggles, who wisely ducked away and disappeared into the crowd. The hill’s lower slope was guarded by Knorth Kencyr. When they saw Jame, a troop of them closed around Jurik’s party, bringing it to a halt.
“Let us through,” Jurik demanded, trying to push past. “I am the crown prince.”
Mint stepped forth. “In that garb,” she said mildly, “you could have fooled me.”
His hulking shadow snorted and charged. Mint side-stepped with wind-blowing, tripping the brigand as he passed. The circle made room for him to fall and regarded him as he sprawled on his face, taking up half the width of the steps, knocked cold. Then they looked away and closed ranks.
“Lady,” Mint said to Jame, “what is your wish?”
“To see the king.”
“Then you shall.”
Kencyr escorted her, Damson, and Rue up the stairs that led to the royal hilltop compound, Jurik sulking at their heels, his retinue straggling behind him. They climbed, then passed through the outer buildings and courtyards, which were lit with a host of mural torches and scattered with more Knorth guards. Here at last was the frieze-bedecked palace with the new temple next to it. Firelight crawled across the former’s facade, making its figures seem to twitch within their frames. The latter was nearly finished. Quite grand it appeared, all white marble and colonnades without, the interior gilded with golden regal coins and mosaics of lapis lazuli. The heroic statue seated on its marble throne that Jame had last seen in the workshop was now set in place before the temple’s door. However, it still lacked its head. This lay to one side, judging by the shape under a sheet. Before it paced the king.
Jurik joined him, gesturing to Jame as if to claim credit for having retrieved her. Mordaunt impatiently waved him away.
“Look,” the king said to the solid, obdurate phalanx of workers who faced him behind their foreman. “Finish the job and I will pay you.”
“You have that backwards, your majesty,” said the foreman, polite but unyielding. “When you pay us, we will finish the job.”
Mordaunt stomped. “I will have the money tonight. Don’t you trust me?”
“We’ve trusted you so far, sire, and not a penny have we seen. We owe the quarries and the stone masons and the sculptors and the laborers. You owe us. Pay.”
“How dare you speak to me like that!” Mordaunt almost screamed. He turned on Harn who stood nearby, Dar and a Knorth ten-command behind him. “Make these sluggards work. By the contract between us, I order you!”
Harn looked uncomfortable: service in the Central Lands had never before included intruding on trade disputes.
Jame crossed over to his side.
“For that matter,” she said to Mordaunt, “you haven’t paid us either.”
Mordaunt laughed in her face. “And yet you obey anyway. Weak, weak, for all your vaunted reputation. Should I reward such frauds as you? Never, never, never!”
“Then I declare our contract void.”
Harn stirred, but didn’t speak.
Mordaunt gaped, then laughed again, contemptuously. “You don’t have the authority. Now, do as I say. Make them work, or damn well hoist that head onto this statue yourselves!”
“Neither. I have leave to speak for my brother, the Highlord of the Kencyrath. We say that this farce is over.”
Harn cleared his throat. “It’s true. She has the right. Blackie told me so.”
So Torisen had passed his judgment on to his commander. Jame hadn’t known that, but should have guessed. Was that why Harn had looked to her for judgment in Karkinaroth?
Lightning glared to the west, illuminating the inner recesses of roiling clouds, throwing shadows across the court. Thunder growled as the storm advanced.
Another group came into the courtyard, led by a stocky young woman clad in black. Pensa. Following her was the City Council, a gaudy array of patricians in a nervous, huddled clot.
Mordaunt spread wide his arms to welcome them. “At last you have come to your senses! Where is my money with which to pay these good folk?”
Pensa faced him, implacable.
“Forget that. You contracted the Shadow Guild for the murder of my father.”
He stared at her. “What proof do you have to make such a ridiculous charge?”
She produced the parchment that Jame had given her.
“I have already shown it to the Council. They do not approve.”
Mordaunt’s lips twitched. Then he smiled crookedly and shrugged as if to shake off something of little importance. “What if I did? It was only politics.”
“It was his life.”
Flash. Boom.
Two of Mordaunt’s ruffians emerged from the crowd. Between them they dragged the actor Trepsis, so frightened that his legs had failed him. He was dressed as if for the stage, in gilt armor, an ornate helmet that tipped over his brow, and a theatrical red cloak that dragged at his heels.
“Ha!” said Mordaunt, advancing on him. “You preening fool. You dare pretend to speak for my grandfather, do you?”
“S-sometimes he speaks through me, your highness,” quavered Trepsis. “I can’t help it.”
Mordaunt slapped him. Jame and Pensa both stepped forward but checked themselves. The ruffians had bent the actor’s arms behind his back, fit to break them, and had lifted him, painfully, onto toes that scrambled to touch the ground.
“You act in his filthy farces!” the king shouted in Trepsis’s face, spraying him with spittle. “You spread sedition!”
“I-I-I can’t help it!”
Someone else slipped forward and whispered in Mordaunt’s ear.
“Ha!” he said again, much louder, with a note of triumph. “Suwaeton’s temple is in flames. So much for him.”
The Council members swayed, murmuring.
“That is the founder of your house,” said Pensa. “The link to your ancestors and to kingship.”
“He is nothing, I tell you! Damn you, grandfather, you are gone, forever and ever. At last!”
A gust of wind scoured the courtyard. Leaves swirled and side torches flared. The sheet over the stone head stirred. Trepsis’s cloak billowed.
The actor bent his head, gathered himself, and seemed to swell. Before, he had cowered in the hollow armor of a giant. Now he began to fill it out. The brigands struggled to hold his arms behind him, but he slowly drew them forth as his sandaled feet came down solidly on the pavement. Then he flexed, and his captors tumbled aside.
General Suwaeton drew himself up, now fully inhabiting clothing more fitted to the battlefield than to the stage. He coughed, spat out a mouthful of sodden, chewed foliage, and wiped his mouth.
“You had to bury me in leaves?” he demanded of Jame. The echo of thunder rolled in his voice, shaking her bones.
“It was the best we could do,” she said. “Sorry. I’m glad that you survived the fire.”
He cleared his throat and spat again. “Hah-whoom! Even now it ravages my sanctuary. Boy.” He turned on Mordaunt. “You owe me a temple. This new toy of yours will do until my worshippers can build me something better.”
It was hard to tell by the flaring light, but Mordaunt’s face seemed to congest with fury. “Well, you can’t have it!” he snarled, stomping his feet. “This is mine, mine, mine!”
Another stronger blast of wind stripped the stone head bare, its sheet flapping away like a frightened ghost. The sharp features revealed did indeed belong to Mordaunt, not to the General. Everyone stared.
“What is this?” Suwaeton rumbled. “Foolish boy, do you pretend to claim godhood?”
Mordaunt glared at him. “Why shouldn’t I? It’s just a matter of faith, isn’t it? Who should the people believe in except for me when all their other gods fail? After tonight, I will reign alone, supreme. Do you think, at this late hour, that you can defeat me?”
“I always could. You are weak. You always were, even as a child. I told your father so, but he was weak too.”
“You over-bore him!” Mordaunt shrieked. Foam flecked his lips. He licked it up with the dry rag of a tongue. “What could he do against you? What could any of us do?”
Suwaeton looked both incredulous and taken aback. “I never meant to run rough-shod over anyone, least of all my own family. Someday, you would have taken my place if only you had been patient. How not?”
Jame had been listening. “Oh,” she said to Mordaunt, partly enlightened but also still puzzled. “You want to become a living god.”
Mordaunt bared his teeth at her in a ferocious grin. “Yes! Why should I die at all, ever?”
“That sounds like something Gerridon would say to his followers. Death itself shall die. Did he give you this idea, maybe also hint that reaping souls might help?”
“Why not? He is immortal. Now I will be too, after I destroy the rest of the Pantheon through its preserved bodies and its temples. Only this one will remain. Then the people will turn to me and give me the immortality that I deserve through their faith. I will reign forever and forever—from my palace, from my temple, over the living, over the dead.”
With that, he fetched up breathless, glaring, panting.
Jame suspected that what he really didn’t want was to face his grandfather in life or especially in death. While he remained defiant, shouting, his spindly legs shook under him and his teeth chattered. There was some courage in that, at least, if only that of a cornered dog.
The storm flashed and shook, painting the courtyard with intermittent bursts of light. The Council members huddled together. The sculpted figures on the palace façade seemed to cavort, the stone head on the ground to grimace.
Jame gingerly approached General Suwaeton. His beard snapped with sparks. The air around him seemed charged.
Dangerous, dangerous . . .
“This belongs to you,” she said, and handed him the second contract that the shadow assassin Smeak had given to her, which she had retrieved earlier that night from her quarters at the campus.
He took the parchment. His eyes raked over the eloquent blank spaces left by mere dye. He blinked. Then he turned on Mordaunt.
“You,” he said, more astonished than, so far, angry, as if he couldn’t quite believe that his grandson had had the guts to do such a thing. “You contracted the Guild to poison me? This life in death is all because of you?”
“And what if it is?” the king shrieked at him. “You . . . you bully, taking up all the air, rolling over everyone like cartwheels to crush our souls. . . . How were we supposed to breathe, much less to live? Yes, I took out a contract on you! I did on my own father. He was weak, as you said. I was destined to be king, yes, of everything. My friend told me so.”
“That would be this Gerridon,” growled the General, his wrath at last kindled. “You loved him, didn’t you? More than your wife. More than any of your children or concubines. He told you what you wanted to hear. I smelled his rot when first he appeared with his Deathless cult. I told you he was poison. You didn’t listen. You knew better. Now here we are, thirty years later, with the city in flames. All because you feared death. People die, you fool. It happens. It happened to me, before my time, because of you.”
Mordaunt gibbered at him.
At his elbow, Jurik looked uneasy.
With a gulp and a sheer act of will, the king collected himself. “You said that you survived the fire because you were buried in leaves. That suggests to me that your body was carried into the garden behind your temple. Jurik!”
The prince jerked to attention, although his eyes rolled white under their gilded lids. Did he stand next to inspiration or to madness?
“Take the guard and reclaim that body. Destroy it. Utterly. You see, grandfather, I will triumph after all!”
As he spoke, the sky roiled and spat. Jame felt the hair rise on her arms and tasted metal.
Oh schist, she thought.
Suwaeton raised his black staff with its silver knob. (Where had that come from?) Lightning lanced down toward it, a jagged flash of light with a simultaneous ripping, thunderous retort. Jame saw it strike the knob and arc toward Mordaunt. Then her muscles locked and she was falling.
It seemed to take forever to hit the ground. During that eternity, images crawled before her stunned eyes which could not blink:
—Mordaunt lightning struck, convulsed. His eyeballs boiled white. His mouth gaped and smoked.
—the stone head split in two, the halves rolling apart.
—the Council sagged where they stood, each kept from collapse, perhaps from death, by the support of their representatives in the Pantheon. Only Pensa stood alone although swaying, a painted woman disdainful and aloof behind her. The Tigganis queen of the gods? Her mother?
My mother may have been a monster, Jame thought, still dazed, but at least she loved me.
Why should that idea come now, as such a revelation?
—Suwaeton faced the dispossessed soul of his grandson, which mouthed at him from the shadows gathering around it.
“Run,” he said. “Trust me: I will follow.”
The ghost turned and fled.
—in his place, wax-faced Gerridon stood on his nest of weirding tendrils. He raised his head, framed in its hood. His lips seemed to smile.
“You are the cause of this boy’s damnation,” the General said to him. “Leave this world forever. By the power invested in me, I command you.”
The other hesitated a moment, then bowed ironically and disappeared.
Jame hit the ground with a gasp. Her entire body hurt, all extremities twitching as the lightning’s energy dispelled. The soles of her boots smoked. The ends of her braids twitched. But now she could breathe again. And blink.
The courtyard took shape around her.
Others too close to the strike had also been felled. Damson and Rue were gathering themselves up, shaken. Mint and Dar had been far enough away to escape the lash. Trepsis huddled on his knees, nursing his scorched hands. A body as scrawny as a child’s lay convulsed on the ground at his feet, smiling blindly upward through clenched teeth. All of the clothes had been burned off of it.
Bojor, thought Jame.
She suddenly wondered if the boy actor had been yet another of Mordaunt’s bastard sons. He had the build. He had the flare. He might have turned to Suwaeton for support as his grandfather. Tonight, had it been he all along and not the rest of the Pantheon, playing his favorite theatrical trick one last time with fatal consequences? Mundane and sacred space could overlap. This poor, doomed boy had been one such link.
Suwaeton had undoubtedly been here, but now he was gone. The storm rumbled off eastward, chasing sputtering clouds, having dropped no rain.
Jurik stood over Mordaunt’s smoking ruin.
“Er,” he said, speechless, aghast. “He’s dead.”
Clearly, he had forgotten Mordaunt’s last command, if he had understood its import to begin with. Something else preoccupied him now.
“I am the crown prince,” he said, drawing himself up, raising his chin. “I claim the throne of High Bashti, heir to Mordaunt Sharp-teeth, as the first of my name.”
IV
Jurik’s proclamation was received with a stunned silence. Perhaps that was because he had embraced the king’s grisly death so much faster than anyone else, perhaps because no one could imagine him in control of the oldest kingdom on the western bank of the Central Lands. But what choice did they have?
Harn cleared his throat. “They should know,” he said gruffly. “You aren’t Mordaunt’s son. You are mine.”
Briefly, Jurik looked pleased; better a legendary randon officer than a pence-pinching, despised monarch. Then he recognized the end to all of his own regal ambitions and his countenance fell.
Flutes and harps sounded afar, moving closer through the compound. Queen Vestula entered the courtyard followed by a nervous retinue of Amalfia’s priestesses. She herself was dressed in finery as the princess. Around the temple she danced, kicking up the hem of diaphanous skirts with glittering heels, tapping on a tabor with long, painted nails.
Jurik looked unnerved as she circled him, humming a nursery rhyme while also seeming to flirt:
“Bye, baby Bunting
The queen’s gone a-hunting
All to catch a Kencyr skin
To wrap a baby Jurik in . . .”
“Please, Mother,” he said, abashed. “Not now.”
Then she turned on Harn.
“My king,” she crooned, reaching up to trace his ear with a long-nailed finger-tip as she passed. He shivered. “My love. Have you come back to me at last?”
Harn looked desperately uncomfortable.
Jame stepped between them. “Leave him alone,” she said.
Vestula sneered at her. “I have heard about you. No man is good enough for you, is he? No woman either. Try that as you age, cold, alone. I at least had one great love, and here he stands.”
“Leave him,” said Jame again. “We are more than the use that we make of each other. He was never more than a tool to you, to deceive, to use, and then to abandon. Is that love? One of us, at least, has been greatly mistaken.”
The queen made as if to slap her. When Jame dodged out of her way, she rushed past and seized Harn’s arm.
“Come . . . with . . . me,” she panted, trying to tug him toward the palace.
However, she might as well have attempted to shift the towering, headless statue of her dead husband. Her ornate heels skidded out from under her. Flushed and furious, she fell to the pavement from which she glared up at Harn as if to say, “Men!”
Pensa had gone to bend over Bojor, but he was beyond help.
Then she turned to help Trepsis, who was attempting to stand on shaky legs, still nursing his burned hands.
In her absence, the Council consulted. Their conference soon concluded, perhaps along lines on which they already agreed, they turned back to the general assembly. One of their number stepped forward. His white robe embroidered with words reminded Jame of the judge’s costume stitched up out of linen legal briefs in the god farce. Was this Lexion, the head of that house, Trepsis’ birth lord?
“Now, lady,” he said soothingly to Vestula, reminding Jame even more of a jurist. “We of High Bashti have other ways of choosing our king. The direct line of Floten has ended with the death of our late king.” He glanced at the still smoldering remains. “Our very late king. Let all here bear witness. His grandfather, of course, remains well regarded and, I am pleased to tell you, intact. As are the other gods. Our society remains whole, if shaken.”
“‘What is, will be,’” murmured Jame. “‘We are the heart of this world. Our ways endure.’”
“Er . . . yes.” He gave her a look as if unsure if she dared to make fun of him, if so not approving. “The army and the city guards are helping to fight fires. Mordaunt’s minions have fled. I see that the Kencyr are here, no doubt to protect you, my dear.”
This last was addressed to Jame with a touch of sarcasm. She had already noticed that the margins of the courtyard were filling up with Knorth. Should she thank the randon bond for such support, or her role as lordan? Probably both. Rue and Damson had come to stand behind her. Now they were joined by Harn, in flight from an enraged Vestula.
“As I was saying,” said Lord Lexion with a soft smile that made Jame want to slap him even more than his reference to her as “my dear” had. “We have long debated how to face such a crisis as this. Other houses before now have claimed to be descendants of the true founder, whoever he was. Floten’s house has failed. Where do we turn next, and must it be to a king?”
Jurik had been seething. Now he burst forth. “Where else,” he demanded, “and why not to me? I am the queen’s son. She brought more to this marriage than he did, and to this country!”
“Yes!” Vestula said, stomping, tottering on her broken heels. “Much more!”
“Lady, dear lady.”
Now Jame really could have hit him for that dismissive note, even though she had no interest in supporting either Jurik or his mother.
“In millennia we have never before had a change of ruling family or a queen regnant. Why not now? I nominate Lady Tigganis.”
He meant Pensa.
She looked up, startled, from where she bent over her actor mentor. “What?”
Lord Lexion knelt before her and extended his hands. “Will you rule over us as our queen?”
She gulped. “Yes.”
Vestula drew herself up, glaring. “I have held that honor for twenty years.”
“Thirty-five,” muttered someone among the Council’s ranks.
“Be quiet! What fault do you find with me?”
“That you were born a foreigner, lady, and are no longer married to the king,” said Lexion. Besides, he might have added, echoing Dar, no one trusted her. “Go back to Amalfia’s sanctuary, as the princess’s high priestess. No one begrudges your service to your Hathiri kinswoman.”
“I should hope not!” she snapped, and flounced off, trailed by her hieratic retinue, which looked relieved to get away.
Jurik gazed after her, bereft, then pulled himself together.
“Have you stopped to think,” he demanded of the Council, “how Hathir will respond to this move? My mother, as you say, was Hathiri, her dowry an offering of peace between the east and west banks of the Silver. They will take this as an insult.”
“They may,” said Pensa. “What, though, if as my first act as reigning monarch I should take you, her son, as my consort?”
The Council murmured over this.
Jurik goggled, at first aghast. Then, considering the alternatives and the possibilities, he looked pleased.
“Yes,” he said, huffing out his chest. “That would do.”
“Then so let it be done.”
“Are you sure about this?” Jame asked Pensa under cover of more exclamations from other houses who had hoped to secure unions of their own with the new queen, followed by a general realization that at present they cancelled each other out.
Pensa gave Jame a tight-lipped smile. “Yes. Trust me.
“My second act,” she continued, raising her voice, “is to guarantee that the Knorth mercenaries are paid in full for their good service up to now and here after. Immediately. Or at least as soon as civil order has been restored, which I expect within days. I trust that other houses will contribute to this effort. Also, I declare a forgiveness for any Knorth who has gone into debt because of the late king’s failure to pay.”
Mint punched Dar in the ribs. He grimaced, then heaved a guilty sigh of relief. Would he keep to that abstemious regime, though? That remained to be seen.
There was more muttering at this, but a general resigned consensus: new rulers required concessions to keep them sweet and, the patricians hoped, compliant.
Jurik, on the other hand, glowered. “Why should we pay them at all? Father . . . that is, Mordaunt . . . didn’t.”
Pensa smiled at him, diamond hard. “Are you at least his son in that? I will remember it. That settles everything, except for my poor father.”
Trepsis tottered out of the crowd, cuddling his hands. They were now seen to be seared to the bone, immobile. Would he ever be able to use them again? Perhaps as his divine patron decreed.
“Lady, the General left you a message. What happened to Prestige is without remedy, he said, but perhaps not beyond justice. Take him as he is into your house. He is to be recognized as a saint.”
Pensa bowed her head. “I will.”
Jurik started up. “I will not! If we must share a house, why should we have such an abomination within our halls? What is he but a walking corpse, sewn together with your misguided devotion? Where, in life, in death, does he have a place?”
“With us,” she said.
No yielding there. Perhaps she remembered the cruel laughter, the torn clothes, the scorn with which she had been dismissed as “dark, squat, ugly” at her aborted engagement party. All of that had indirectly led to her father’s murder. Yes, Pensa had more scores than one to settle with her soon-to-be spouse.
“You will welcome him as your father-in-law,” she added, to drive the point home. “Do you think that I care about anything you say? A mere consort has no power. Ask your mother about that and then be quiet.”
“You wait,” he cried in frustration. “Your father had ambitions in life. Why not in death? Where is your precious general then?”
A mutter rose in Jame’s memory: “I’m hungry. I’m hungry.”
“We will see,” said the new queen, and turned to her duties.