Arc 8: Chapter 44: Dawn Over the Banner |
We were many days in Tall Carreweir, days which would become weeks. It was my intention to leave along with my group before dawn, but the lance was already embroiled in the chaos at the Herald’s Keep, and became further invested in its aftermath. Amelia Hare, who had never quit the city, returned to the palace along with her retinue and allies. She took command over the Banner’s capital along with Alfonse Lorn, who organized his fellow nobles to clear the usurper’s influence from their streets.
Evangeline plotted her takeover well. There were vampires and enthralled humans who hadn’t been freed of the Wolf Queen’s influence even with her death. Her powers came from a demon, and wounds left by demons do not heal clean. Her undead captains stubbornly resisted efforts to remove them, and there were ugly days and nights of fighting to take the forts those fallen knights claimed as their roosts.
There were more out in the countryside. Evangeline left a mark on that realm, one that did not fade with her passing. Though Lord Alfonse had betrayed her, many of his peers had been seduced by Evangeline’s words that last night in truth, and later on rumors would spread that some accepted the dark kiss of undeath from her lesser successors. They would even make of themselves an order of sorts, the Knights of the Pale Lady, and took the mark of a white wolf howling at a black moon as their symbol.
But they did not claim the realm as she had, and none would prove her equal.
But that was all in later months and later years. Rysanthe vanished the night after her rescue, claiming she needed to report to her masters in the Underworld, and despite all the effort and danger of freeing her, she went like a quiet morning wind. It was a stark anticlimax, Death’s departure, but she wasn’t some grateful princess and I was no dashing white knight. She had her own responsibilities, and there was fallout we both needed to attend to. I offered my services to the clans of the Banner for some weeks, falling back into my role as an agent of the Imperial Throne while my companions rested and healed. Emma was spitting angry that she’d missed the dramatic conclusion of our conflict against the Briar King and the Wolf Queen, but she and Hendry saw plenty of action in the following weeks as Evangeline’s loyalists refused to surrender.
There was talk of calling for Inquisition to root out the vampiric threat in the kingdom. I argued against it, saying the clans of the Banner needed to reassert control themselves, prove to their people that they could protect them even as Evangeline had promised to. I did not want to see the Red Trident hovering over that country, for the likes of Oraise and the Knights Penitent to regain power after their defeats in Reynwell and Osheim. They would only make more heretics with their methods, drive more desperate, frightened people to the seductive powers of the Adversary.
Part of me believed it was what Reynard and his demons wanted. Yith had tried to stir the red clericons of the Priory of the Arda and their priorguard to paranoia and excess in the Emperor’s city the same way, knowing that turning humans against themselves would do its work for it.
I said as much, but I couldn't be certain they heard me. A year under the Wolf Queen’s rule had turned them all suspicious and vicious, made them see monsters in every shadow. The vampiric monarch’s popularity with the commonfolk didn’t help — Evangeline Ark had been a hero to the Bannerland’s masses — and the threat of rebellion hung over those meetings like a dark cloud.
Olliard was offered a post for his own role with the newly minted Lord Governess of Tall Carreweir, but he refused it. Apparently, the plan to destroy the castle and kill everyone inside had been known to his benefactors, the Banner’s own nobility, so he faced no censure for either the attempt or the failure.
“I could have had them all,” he said to me when we stood on the walls of the palace on the sixth day, waiting for the sun to go down. The old doctor had seemed to age a decade in days, and he glared out over the darkening city with shadowed eyes and stooped posture. There were always more deaths when the sun set, as Evangeline’s heirs emerged from the dens they’d hidden in.
“You wouldn’t have,” I said without heat. “She had more subordinates in the Dawntowers and scattered across the region. Evangeline intended to build something here, and she wouldn’t have risked it all at a party. Especially not knowing even part of what Lillian and Ildeban planned.”
“She is dead?” Olliard asked. We’d already had this conversation, but he didn’t seem to believe me, or the stories that an Alder Knight could not lie.
Well, to be fair, I could lie now. Sometimes. I still hadn’t gotten the trick of what mistruths would burn me and which would not, so I avoided it. Olliard didn’t know that, however, and he kept poking.
A bell rung in somewhere in the city. I waited for it to stop before speaking. “I saw it myself.”
“Saw it?” He asked. “You did not perform the deed?”
I had told no one what actually transpired on that hill. “She’s dead, Olliard. Destroyed, whatever you want to call it. She won’t trouble us anymore.”
“She’s still troubling us,” Olliard reminded me with a wave to the city and its reaching shadows. “She will be until we burn every single one of her larvae from the face of this world.”
I didn’t know what to say. I remembered this man as a kindly old healer who’d saved my life, treated my injuries, taken in an orphan girl who’d been left all alone in the world. The past two years had changed him, and not for the better. He’d become dogmatic. Hateful. I saw in him the shadow of the Priory, of bleak names like Inquisition and Crusade.
“Where is your apprentice?” I asked, changing the subject.
Olliard seemed to deflate. “Gone. I have looked for him, sent out the usual signals, but I think he’s fled this country. He and I only began working together recently, so to him I expect it was merely a partnership of convenience.”
I didn’t know what to say to that either. I hadn’t known that boy, Carus, hadn’t even spoken to him. Yet he wanted to kill me, because I’d been there the night his father died. Something told me I hadn’t seen the last of him.
“I want you to stay away from Lisette,” I said.
Olliard didn’t quite manage to control his flinch. “Has she spoken to you?”
We’d talked a little, but not about what happened during the battle inside the Herald’s Keep. Not about Penric, and little about Olliard. The young cleric had become even more taciturn than usual, more withdrawn. I could tell it annoyed Emma and worried Hendry, but we’d all been too busy to address it.
I addressed it now, in my own way, knowing there would be more later.
To Olliard I said, “She is sworn to the Empress, and to me. If you have any further business with us from this day forward, then you will talk to me directly.”
The vampire hunter spoke his next words with an odd effect, like he were reaching his hand towards a hot stove just to prove he had no fear of it. “Or what?”
“Or nothing. I’m not a vagabond anymore, doctor. I’m a servant of the Accord and I answer directly to the Emperor and the Empress. To a higher power, really.”
He snorted. “To angels?”
I said nothing. After some time, he nodded. I took that as affirmation and turned to go.
“Will the Empress punish her?” He asked before I’d gone far.
I paused, considering the question. “Because she was your spy all along? Because you planted her with the Inquisition, pushed her into the service of the Empress, used her like a tool to manipulate them against one another while you kept to the shadows?”
I turned to gauge his response. Olliard was angry, his jaw tight.
“You are one to talk,” he said. “You play your own games, weave your own schemes. I never asked anything of her that I did not ask of myself, and I have faced my own share of danger. We are fighting a war.”
I chose my words carefully. “If Rosanna Silvering learns that Lisette infiltrated her court on your behalf, her position will demand that she has Lisette exiled, maybe even killed. An oath like the one she would have sworn to enter royal service is not made lightly.”
Olliard’s face bled of color. “Then, you can’t expect me to just—”
“It’s not your concern anymore,” I said. “Stay out of her life, Olliard Van Kell. You'll just put it at risk.”
The old man lowered his head. “She's like a daughter to me.”
I felt he believed it, at least. “Then leave her be,” I said, calm despite the harshness of the words. “Leave her to the life she’s building for herself.”
I turned again to leave, but Olliard was not done.
“Have you ever had children, Alken? Do you know what it’s like?”
When I shook my head, the doctor nodded. “I had three sons,” he told me. “One died as a boy, to illness — I was living in the Marches, beyond the God-Queen’s blessings. The other was killed in war. And the third… The third I lost along with his mother, to the Duke of Kell. I traveled to that land and destroyed the things wearing their corpses. It was the only healing I could offer them.”
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He turned then, taking both the last word and putting his back to me as I’d tried to do to him. “I will not stop fighting them, not until I take my last breath.”
He left then, leaving me alone on the wall as the Bannerlands were plunged into night. Many things made sense to me in that moment. The Duke hadn’t been here to support the Bannerfolk or destroy a potential threat to whatever status quo he valued. It had been to mock that old man, and goad him to suicide.
It was a cold comfort, to know I’d been right. There were far worse evils in the world than Evangeline Ark.
Lisette was ensconced in a small chamber set in a wing of the Herald’s Keep that’d been converted into a sort of hospital. She’d been given a private room on my insistence. I’d told Lady Amelia it was so she could prayer in peace, work her clerical magics without disturbance. It was mostly true.
The morning after my conversation with Olliard, I stepped inside that room and shut the door behind me. Lisette sat on a stool by a simple bed, upon which lay a dead man. Penric was stripped down to his drawers, his scarred chest crisscrossed by stitches made from thread of gold — real, rather than aura, and incredibly valuable. They marked the places where his flesh had been peeled back from bone, where organs had been reinforced or replaced. The room stank of tallow, incense, and the subtly electric smell of freshly burned aura. There were jars of sacred unguents laid on a table by the bedside, and a censor burning from a chain on the wall.
Lisette immediately stood, brushing down her white-and-yellow Abbey habit and bowing her head. “Ser.”
I said nothing to her at first, making sure the door clicked behind me and that I sensed no one listening. I walked to the other side of the bed, looking down at my lance’s archer. Penric was asleep, or something like it. His eyes were closed, his face upturned and his limbs flat. He looked like a man being prepared for his own burial, and indeed all the tools — including the surgical implements laid out from one of Lisette’s satchels — were the kind made for embalming.
“How is he doing?” I asked.
Lisette took a moment to steady herself before answering. “I do everything I can to slow the rot, but it’s not possible to halt it completely. I’ve had to replace some of his organs. I was never trained in this, only studied records, so some of it I had to improvise.”
I knew Penric’s lungs were actually stitched bags of leather, like those used to make bagpipes, that Lisette had needed to line his muscles in salt and replace his intestines with bundles of corded rope. Being undead was a strange business. So long as all the pieces resembled the original, he could maintain his sense of humanity — it was the same idea behind the creation of Marions and other automata, that a vessel needed to have a strong resemblance to a living organism in order to gain the spark of aura, of thought and will.
“There are orders in the Church who understand this better,” Lisette continued, her voice full of suppressed worry and self-doubt. “The Cenocastia, the Scribes of the Eleventh Verse, the Mediirite Chapters, the seers responsible for preparing and raising Dead Saints…”
I held up a hand, palm facing forward, and Lisette fell silent. I knew what she was trying to do, that she meant to draw attention to the Church’s history of proscribed necromancy, the fact that there were circumstances and traditions under which her actions were not heretical. Trying to convince herself.
“You are not a sanctioned necromancer,” I said. “Penric is not the spirit of some old king from Draubard who volunteered to have himself raised once every century or two, so the living can hear his wisdom. You brought him back with your Art, tethered his soul to you. He’s your slave, Lisette.”
The cleric flinched. “I… I didn’t mean to.”
I paced to the foot of the bed, my hands behind my back so my cloak hid them. “If that were the case, you would have broken the bond as soon as you realized and told me. You know I wouldn’t have turned you over to the Inquisition, not knowing they would strip your Art from you through torture, then burn you as a witch.”
All the color bled from her already pale face.
“I wouldn’t do it,” I continued after a pause, “because I’ve done worse. But Penric isn’t like Vicar, Lis. He’s not like the ghosts attached to me. He's our comrade. Our friend.”
I was a necromancer too, a warlock. The fate I’d just described would be true of me as well, if I ever let the priorguard take me again. My position, the Emperor and Empress, that day when two angels of the Choir of Onsolem had sanctioned me in front of all the high lords and ladies of the Accord — those things protected me. I had power and influence, and while it wasn’t fair, it was the way of the world.
But Lisette only had me to protect her. Me, and Rosanna Silvering, who she had betrayed. She needed to understand her position in full.
“What are you going to do?” Lisette asked.
I shrugged. “With you? I’m not sure. This kind of thing is a slippery slope. It corrupts, according to every story and record. I’ve seen it myself. Save for Sans, every necromancer I’ve ever met has been a lunatic. You’ve covered your own magic in grave soil and blood, Lis. That’s not easy to clean off, and if you keep using it…”
She was already shaking her head. “I can’t just stop using my powers. We’re not done.”
I’d expected an answer like that, and gave her a small nod. “Then you’re going to need to be very careful. If you do what you’ve done to Penric again… It will get worse, I think. You will get worse. Angrier, more paranoid. Ghosts will start to seek you out, and if they manage to get into you…”
Lisette hugged herself. I’d scared her. I had meant to.
“I’m talking from experience,” I said more gently. “For me, it’s just how my powers work. Part of the life I’ve lived, the choices I’ve made. I’m a kind of monster, Lisette, one that got made bits and pieces at a time. The difference…”
Instead of explaining, I lifted a hand and made a slow fist, focusing my will. The lights in the room, the alchemical lamps, even the bit of morning daylight beaming through the small, high window, all dimmed. After a moment I let up, and it all returned to normal. Lisette took an unconscious step away from me, looking frightened.
I showed her my empty hand. “I have power over it. But you’re an ordinary human, and the dead will use you. Your Art is a direct link to your soul. How you use it leaves a mark.”
The young woman lifted both of her hands and clenched them into fists, looking bitter. “I didn’t want things to go this way. I didn’t… I didn’t want to be a killer. I feel like an idiot for treating you like I did when we met, condemning you for being a soldier.”
I smiled. “I miss that girl. She was smart.”
The woman who’d been that girl didn’t seem to agree. “I killed people when I was with the Priory. Olliard taught me how, because he knew I might need to. Make your soul as barbed wire, he said. And I did.”
I remembered. She’d murdered two men the day she rescued me. Was that the first time? If it was, then I felt very sorry for her. My own clumsiness had forced her to it.
“Now I barely recognize myself,” she said bitterly.
In that instant, I knew I’d done right telling the doctor to stay clear of us. If I’d spoken to Lisette first, it would have been an effort not to throw him off that wall.
“Do you want to quit?” I asked her. When she stared at me in shock, I met her gaze steadily and asked again. “Do you? I’ll let you. Maybe, with time, you can wash the blood from your soul and return to just being a healer again.”
After a minute of thought, she shook her head. “No. I’d spend my whole life a coward. I’m tired of hiding.”
I nodded and turned to the door, so she could finish tending to Penric in peace. She spoke as I placed my hand on the latch.
“Are you going to tell the Empress?” She asked. “About Olliard.”
I didn’t answer her. My loyalty to Rosanna was a twisted thing, and I never knew how I’d act around her, what those old bonds would compel me to admit. Perhaps I could convince my queen to be gentle with the cleric, to not punish her for the lies and the ulterior motives, but she was daughter of House Silvering, who’d been gutted by betrayal and nearly destroyed. She would not forgive even the threat of it easily.
When I moved out into the hallway and closed the door, I found two other young faces staring back at me. Emma and Hendry were both in plainclothes, their injuries treated, their limbs rested. Their gazes were hard, and they blocked my way down the hallway.
“You’re not going to tell the Empress about her,” Emma said tartly. She used her most aristocratic inflections, making the statement a fact rather than a question.
Hendry spoke with his more characteristic reserve. “She doesn’t deserve to be punished. She meant well — means well — and besides! She’s one of us. She and Penric both…”
I stared at them, and what I found in their determined faces surprised me. “You knew?”
“About her being a necromancer and Penric her thrall?” Emma asked with arched eyebrows. “Obviously. We spent an entire winter with her. It was quite difficult to miss, though I suppose you’ve been somewhat distracted by your own dramas.”
“Penric is still himself,” Hendry insisted. “Mostly. And you know what will happen if the Church finds out!”
I held up a hand, just as I’d done with Lisette to forestall more argument. Hendry shut up immediately, obedient as a hound, but Emma just glowered at me. I studied them a while, thinking it over. I’d seen the signs, of course, ever since our group reunited back at Rosanna’s camp. Hell, I’d found it miraculous that Penric had revived back during the Vyke crisis, but Hyperia had too. Undead were created naturally all the time, especially from violent deaths.
“And did you both know that she entered the Empress’s service as a spy for Olliard Van Kell,” I asked them in a hard voice. “Or that she meant to kill herself along with him when they detonated their bomb? That she’s been planning to leave us all this time, one way or another?”
Half in guilt, I thought. The cleric had been carrying a darkness in her for a long time, and I hadn’t realized.
At their shock and hesitation, I knew they hadn’t figured that part out. With a nod I said, “I don’t intend to turn her over to the wolves. If Rosanna finds out that Lisette made her oaths under false pretenses, then I’ll vouch for her. And if the Inquisition comes knocking, I’ll show them the door.”
Or steel, if necessary. There was no love lost between me and the Priory.
They both relaxed. I glanced at Emma, not bothering to hide my own surprise at her visible relief. “I thought you hated her. Where did all that choir girl talk go?”
Emma coughed and turned her face, quickly adopting a prim look. Was it my imagination, or had she just blushed? “Well, she’s part of our group… it’s important to be loyal to your own pack, at least. Even a shrike like me can understand that much.”
Hendry just folded his arms and shifted uncomfortably. I got the sense he was trying not to react, almost as though he understood her reaction better than I did.
“Besides,” Emma continued as she regained her composure. “Now that she’s a tainted heretic like the rest of us, she’s practically family. At this point, we may as well consider it a rite of passage to raise a corpse or bind a fiend.”
I snorted. “Well, her circumstances are… delicate. Keep a watch on her, alright? Being alone is especially dangerous when you dabble with this kind of power. It has a tendency to fill that silence.”
They both muttered their agreement, and I felt a bit more easy about the whole thing. It was still a delicate situation, for all of us. Emma had her own curse, and I suspected there were still Carreon loyalists out there like Lillian, ones who might seek the resurrection of their dark lady. Not to mention Nath, and the Briar. Then there was Hendry, riddled with devil iron and cursed in his own way, and Lisette with her dabbling in necromancy.
And me. God, was I cursed through and through.
A fine lot of villains we made.
Olliard Van Kell vanished from the city not long after, and I knew it would eventually be time for me to do the same. While I knew that both Markham and Rosanna would want me to remain until they called for me, to act as a representative of their alliance and to witness the stabilization of the long-fractured kingdom of the Banner, there were other masters I answered to, and I knew they had not forgotten what I’d said to them that day, my brash pronouncement. I waited for a new sign. For closure, perhaps.
I received it mid spring.
