Ysabelle III

 YSABELLE

Lord Rhovan, dressed for battle, sat his charger in the brittle chill of spring dawn. His ceramic alloy plate was a deep, dark red and his snorting, ill-tempered mount was the color of blood. He wore a pistol at his left hip and across his knees was a long-handled warhammer heavy enough to smash a knight's ceramic breastplate into his lungs. It reminded Ysabelle of Fyodor's hammer, that Eye-stained thing with its broken stone head and splintery handle. Sieur Boris sat beside his liege with the manticore banner flying from his ceremonial pike.

Lord Rhossart was too fat for armor; he wore a fur-trimmed coat over his red suit and orange vest. His mount was a placid, stocky mare. Vitali had gone south to pledge the allegiance of the Northern Provinces to Sofia's cause, but the rest of Lord Rhovan's family and client lords were with him on the field. Lord Renfield Urquhart, Lady Bazhukov with her gimlet eyes and massive shoulders, Sieur Simeon Yarinoff, and the pitiless Harkov triplets who ruled their lands jointly. Them and their families, those who'd been knighted and blooded. A few northern priests, Fyodor among them, walked alongside the horses in their bearskin cloaks and old-fashioned armor.

The town of Cold Fords lay at their back, and before them were the three frozen rivers that gave it its name. A mile away on the near bank were arrayed the legions of Sieur Siegfried Ramm, the man everyone said had killed King Luke on the night of Lord Saul's and little Rhossart's deaths. Half of us are gone, thought Ysabelle. Now they said her aunt, still Anaias's vassal, had been crushed by the Blackwalls beneath the walls of Valsir. Ysard's brother had died in that city. I never want to see it again. Not if I live to be a hundred.

Ysard, her cousin and protector, rode beside her in the thick of Lord Rhovan's command. He wore no armor and stubble darkened his once clean-shaven jaw. His green stormcoat was rumpled and soiled, his shirt collar yellow with sweat. The long yellow scarf he wore was stained with dark blotches of wine, unless it was blood. He'd spent much of his time in Cold Fords at the pubs and wine sinks, drowning his brother Yannis's memory in cheap liquor. They were close, she remembered from their visits. Hardly away from each other. On Ysabelle's other side Master Drusus cut a cleaner figure in his black suit, good winter coat, and flashing spectacles. He'd found a round fur hat somewhere to cover his balding head.

Across the mile-wide no-man's land between armies, another command prepared itself to treat with Rhovan's. The gilded armor of the Knights Corpus flashed in the wintery sunlight. Atticus Cloyt, the radical scholar who'd founded Mule's Point University, had disparaged the Knights Corpus as a bad joke on the legacy of the Knights of the Branch, but Sieur Siegfried and his cronies looked impressive enough. We outnumber them, though. Her father's captain of the guard, Sieur Bowman Grant, had taught her how to take a rough account of a legion's strength by its standards and formations. At least forty thousand of them. Two full legions to our three and change.

A hush full over the assembled nobility. Lord Rhovan looked out over the tundra to where Ramm's escort had formed an honor guard around him. “Now,” he said, and heeled his horse forward.

They advanced, thirty-odd men and women in fur, wool, kevlar, and ballistic plate. Ysabelle urged her pony after them. It felt strange. Wrong. What am I doing here? It should be my father, or my aunt. Except she's on the other side of the war.

Closer, Ysabelle recognized most of Sieur Siegfried's men from court. There was squat, squinty Geoffrey Vanciber, there Abram Reincrow and his sister Lethe, and beside them the barrel-chested figure of Sieur Robert Rath. A few collegiate sorcerers with shaved heads and red robes trimmed in golden vair rode beside Sieur Siegfried, while behind him rode a tall, hooded figure in a brown cloak that hid his face. The knight himself was tall, his dirty-blond hair windblown and messy, his blue eyes lively. He smiled as the two groups drew near one another.

“Lord Rhovan,” said the traitor knight, flashing his charming grin as he pulled back on his golden stallion's reins. The horse halted with a snort. “It doesn't look as though you've come to dip your banners to the King. Are we going to have a tiff in front of the children?”

“Surrender or die, regicide.” Lord Rhovan's scowl was black as a thunderhead. “The north knows no monarch but Sofia Rassianus.”

“And yet,” said Sieur Siegfried, “you've spent thirty years doing an excellent impression of a province that recognized Luke Kvalus as its king and sovereign.”

Rhovan's face tightened. His knights had murder in their eyes and their hands were on the butts of their guns, the hilts of their swords. Ysabelle's pony whinnied and stepped back, shying from the violence in the air. She glanced left at where Fyodor stood with his hard-faced brothers. The priest was frowning at Lady Bazhukov, who sat brooding in her saddle with her sword half-drawn.

“I offer your men the chance to take up valorous arms,” said Lord Rhovan through clenched teeth. “You'll face trial for your crimes once Rassian is taken.”

Sieur Siegfried looked unimpressed. “Well then,” he said, “I suppose that's that. Vitali?”

The brown-cloaked man threw back his hood. Lord Rhovan gaped, speechless, at his son.

Vitali? But he went south to meet the Queen's armies. Ysabelle's heart was a frozen lump of stone inside her breast. He can't be here.

Lady Bazhukov's sword took Lord Rhovan's head off in a spray of blood. Red droplets struck Ysabelle's sleeve and her mount's flank. The pony spooked and broke into a gallop as Sieur Boris turned his mount, his bearded face bloodless, and was cut down in a hail of bullets. The two armies stood silent and dark against the snowy plain, their breath misting before them, as in the dead white space between their ranks the two honor guards came together in a bloody tangle. A few of the northerners tried to break for freedom, but sorcerous fire engulfed them as they fled. Lord Rhossart was shouting for his sword when two men dragged him from his horse.

Ysabelle saw Master Drusus slump in his saddle, then fall to the ground. She saw Ysard dueling Sieur Geoffrey until another of the Knights Corpus rode up and shot her cousin through the heart, then again in the head. She twisted, thumping her heels against her pony's heaving flanks, but the animal just plunged on through the brittle snow. I'm going to die, she thought as an Imperial sorcerer met her eyes across the churned expanse. I don't know enough to stop him.

He was theatrical. There was no burst of flame, no thunder of phantasmal guns. Instead a great bear of hoarfrost, snow, and frozen dirt heaved itself up out of the ground and lunged at Ysabelle and her pony with a roar like rotten ice breaking. The pony screamed as icy claws raked its rump. The bear shambled after them. No, thought Ysabelle. No. This is ridiculous. She opened her Second Eye, swallowing the bile it brought to her throat.

There is no bear. Snow doesn't live.

The construct collapsed mid-lunge, its feeble ideation unable to stand up to sorcerous scrutiny. Ysabelle laughed out loud, fury and grief forgotten in that golden moment. Then something heavy hit her in the stomach. She grunted, doubling over, and saw blood in her spit as it dribbled onto the pommel of her saddle. The snow raced by beneath her. My womb, she thought sadly. Her glove, pressed to her belly, came away red with blood. The world was fuzzing around the edges, and what sounds she could still hear were screams and the thunder of hooves.

She turned, her head spinning, and saw a knight on horseback pounding toward her, a rifle in his hands. He shouted something and then sparks flared around his flying hair and he went up like an oily rag. His horse had just started to burn when the world ran together and dribbled down into a deep, black hole, and then there was nothing left at all.

YSABELLE II

YSABELLE

The caribou herds were gone when Fyodor took her in the grey predawn light to the field where before they had coursed in their endless thousands and tens of thousands. The field of snow was churned to slush and mud. A few packs of lean grey wolves feasted on unfortunate stragglers, ripping at meat already freezing in the bitter cold. Ysabelle stood on the roadside with her teacher, shivering in her fur-trimmed coat, woolen dress and fez. Winter is unkind, she thought.

IRA IV

 Dead leaves and snow skirled through the open cellar door. It banged against its frame, caught helpless in the gusting wind. Ira dressed himself in the simple workman's clothes laid out for him. Felt cap, long pressed-wool overcoat, starched shirt and stained waistcoat. The shoes were cracked, the socks thick and knobbly. He rubbed his hands together, trying to chafe some warmth back into them. His stomach ached where Marius had opened it. Uncle, he thought, I owe you a favor.

ANORA II

Anora walked barefoot along the shore, beyond the reeking clamor of the dockside and the industrial riot of Leviathan Bay. Seagulls hopped ahead of her through the seaweed and melting snow, shrieking in their ugly, metallic voices. Concrete pipes large enough to swallow automobiles whole, their mouths crusted with icicles, belched runoff into trenches laid in the sand and small grey crabs scuttled in and out of the sluggish streams. Anora brought her foot down on one. Its shell broke beneath her weight and purplish ichor oozed out onto the sweep of the shore. It felt like stepping on an egg. The crab died, after a time, and Anora walked on.

Jonathan III

“It isn't fair,” she said. She lay slumped on a fainting couch, too drunk to stand, her blue evening dress soaked in the blood of the slave she'd killed. An empty wine bottle lay on its side by her dangling fingers. Jonathan stood by the fireplace, his bad leg complaining at the abuse he'd heaped upon it dragging Alisayne up the stairs to the study adjoining her apartments. She had done nothing but drink and repeat the same three words over and over while outside the muted sounds of shelling rolled over the city like thunder.

Anora I

 ANORA

Anora helped her brother buckle on his lacquered white bamboo armor over the thin sheath of ceramic plate his slaves had fitted to his slender frame over his leather quilting. “I don't see why father insists you lead the legions personally,” she said as she cinched tight the breastplate's straps. Her brother's apartments in the Lysandric Palace were bright and spacious, warm even in winter thanks to the Palace's furnaces. White linen curtains bellied over heating registers while outside snow fell on the grim industrial city. The koi in the ornamental pools set into the floor swam in dumb circles.

Saul I

Traveling by sea did not agree with Saul Lyr's stomach. Now that he was chained in the squalid brig of a wallowing Moshangari barge, the sea had decided to escalate the conflict from squabble to all-out war. For the hundredth time in as many minutes the former Chancellor of the Empire of Artaxas retched weakly, his neck and back aching with the strain. His breakfast, what he'd managed to choke down of it, was splattered across the deck in a drying puddle. The air in the brig was sharp with the acid stink of vomit. Saul had nothing left in him to bring up.

This is hell, he thought as he lay gasping on the deck, his stubble fouled with crusted vomit, his hands chained behind his back. Once a day his jailer, a heavy-featured Moshangari woman, brought a dipper full of brackish water and a crust of stale black bread. Sometimes, without apparent reason, she gave him the bounty of a boot to the stomach. His collection of bruises was fast becoming spectacular. What did it matter, though? His wife, his children, his king: all dead. Stephen's plans had come to nothing; his secret alliance had disintegrated with John's army on the Reach, and the Dead God only knew if Sofia survived. Saul coughed, then lay wheezing for a while. The deck rocked back and forth, back and forth as though the barge were a mother trying to shake its noisome child to death.

How long have I been at sea?

It seemed he should have known the answer. Once he had set great store by dates and punctuality, by knowing the names and faces of Stephen's court and the potentates of the Church, his secret enemy. He had forgotten all of them, now, and what did it matter? What had any of it mattered?

Somewhere within the ship's monolithic bulk, engines thundered and boomed. Saul knew he was going to Heaven, and that there was nothing he could do about it. Like his father before him he would sail out beyond the Empire's waters to that chain of islands forbidden to all but the Throne's sanctioned captains and shipping concerns. White sand, palm trees nodding in the sea breeze, men and women shuffling dead-eyed through cattle runs topped with barbed wire as eyeless drones flew in slavering circles above them, waiting to be fed. Paradise.

When three days later the ship's rocking and wallowing came to an end, Saul knew he was right. For a day's sailing in every direction the sea was dead calm around Eleazora's seat. When he and Stephen had gone to renew the Flesh Tithe agreements with her six years before, it had sent shivers up his spine to see the ocean stretched out around him like a plane of glass. It made it too easy to see what was under the clear blue water, down in the depths. In the darkness of his cell in the ship's brig he fell into an exhausted sleep.

In the morning, Saul's gaoler came for him with two priests in the long red robes and broad-brimmed hats of the Imperial Inquisition. Saul said nothing as he was unchained and taken up through the bowels of the ship, half-dragged by the Moshangari woman who'd made him her special project. His legs were weak and the wan sunlight abovedecks made his eyes smart. The forecastle was empty, the smokestacks above the bridge silent and dark like ash-blackened watchtowers.

The older of the two priests, a woman of forty or so with pale skin and a livid scar that ran from her upper lip to just below her right eye, removed her hat and turned to look at Saul as his captor forced him to his knees at the base of the forecastle stair where the woman and her fellow Inquisitor, a young man with doughy features and cold, bored eyes both stood. She was bald, her scalp scraped clean of hair. “Saul Lyr,” she said. “You know where you are.”

“Yes,” said Saul. His voice was hoarse and faint, barely audible over the gentle slap of the calm sea against the hull of the barge as it cut through the water, coasting on momentum.

“You are a traitor to Crown and Throne,” said the Inquisitor. “You know this.”

The sunlight plunged knives into Saul's watering eyes. The Inquisitor swam before him, a sexless spike of red with eyes like lumps of coal set badly in the waxen sockets of her skull. Behind her were the sky and the cries of circling gulls. “Yes,” Saul said. His chapped lips bled, some.

“There is no god but Our Lady, the Empress of Heaven,” said the Inquisitor. “How can a sin against Heaven be forgiven?”

“I don't-”

The gaoler's weathered hands looped a garroting cord around Saul's neck before he could so much as shout. His breath hissed pitifully though his constricted airway as, weakened, he fought against his assailant. Black spots formed and burst before his eyes. His feet skidded over the deck. She was dragging him to the rail while the Inquisitors watched, silent and impassive. He kicked and fought, wheezing for air. His feet left the deck as the gaoler knotted the garroting cord around his throat and lifted him bodily in her arms. He heard her swear, “fuck,” and then the deck spun and he was over the rail, flailing at the ship's barnacle-crusted hull with desperate strength. He hit the water as though it were concrete and what remained of his breath was crushed from his lungs. Cold swallowed him, bone-chilling and absolute.

My sins will go down to the sea and drown. Saul kicked frantically, trying to distance himself from the ship even as he scrabbled with numb fingers at the cord around his throat. He saw Katrina drifting past him, young and beautiful with flowers in her hair and her mother's ugly iron bridal torc around her neck. In her arms she held their children, pink and new. In an instant she was gone and Saul struggled alone beneath the water, silvery bubbles flowing from his open mouth. He could not loose the cord about his throat, and blackness edged in ever closer about his vision. I am going to die.

He fainted.

The dull shock of impact as his cheekbone cracked against the barge's deck brought him shivering and spitting back to wakefulness. For an instant he thought he lay sprawled in the mud on the Grieving Reach, Sieur Arman standing before him over his father's corpse, Saul's knifeman slung over one massive shoulder. That was a long time ago. Another life. A pace away the two Inquisitors were deep in conversation with a naked, skeletal Regent. The angel's haloed palms glowed with a soft golden light. Her eyes were like cut emeralds, bright and alive with an inner fire. Saul was reminded of an albino crocodile he had seen in his uncle Isseles' menagerie at Golden Harbor.

“Mother says that you are late,” said the Regent. Her voice was flat and uninflected. Water dripped from her naked skin and puddled on the deck around her feet. Behind her knelt the ship's crew in serried ranks, eyes downcast and lips moving in silent prayer.

The Inquisitors prostrated themselves. “Our blood is Heaven's,” said the elder of the two.

The angel watched them, head tilted birdlike to one side. Without warning, she struck. The younger Inquisitor screamed piteously as pale hands flipped him over onto his back like a mud crab and split his ribs apart with impossible strength. The angel plunged her head into his open chest and began to gorge, ripping and tearing with sharp white teeth. Blood drenched the deck. The angel's high, thin shoulder blades rose and fell as she swallowed. The dying Inquisitor's eyes rolled back into his head as the angel straddled his hips, her knees at the level of her arched back.

Saul retched, breath rasping in his tortured throat. He watched the angel feast, unable to look away. He thought of his years working in the capital with Ithuriel and the twins. Had they glutted themselves on man each morning before their ablutions? He had never seen a Regent naked before. A cloaca lay between her lean, muscular legs and her breasts, devoid of nipples, were small and firm. An alien bone structure shifted beneath her milky skin. They eat us like children handed sweets, thought Saul as the Regent withdrew from her kill, ragged scraps of flesh dangling from her mouth. The surviving Inquisitor did not look up. How many has she seen taken?

The angel looked at Saul and her emerald eyes held his. “My mother awaits you,” she said, and in a flicker of white she vanished over the rail and back into the sea.

Saul lay soaked and shivering on the deck, ignored by the sailors going about their business, by the prostrate Inquisitor and her dead companion, by the Moshangari gaoler kneeling at the rail and by the gulls that circled overhead like the souls of the ravenous damned.    

Jonathan II

The attack had been ruthless and swift, faster even than sorcerers could have managed. Two of the city's standing munitions plants had been bombed along with the slave markets abutting the Plaza of Servitude and the aerodrome in the shadow of the Serpentspire, not to mention the Spire itself. There had been no irreparable damage, and little loss of life, but the implications of the strike were clear. Golden Harbor could hurt the occupying armies at will and with impunity. Or, almost. One of their flying machines had crashed on the Street of Locusts, a notorious haunt for grifters, thieves and footpads of all sorts. The machine had come down in amongst the stalls of the street's ragged merchants and smashed them, along with itself, to flinders. A pilot in flying leathers and aviation goggles lay slumped in the cockpit, her face a mask of blood. A broken propeller spun drunkenly at the thing's crumpled prow while guardsmen shouted at the crowds to keep their distance.

Jonathan pushed shut the door of his car and limped toward the wreck, ignoring the screams of the wounded and the cries of a fat Angelist priestess on the street corner inciting the people to repent of their sins against the Throne. His leg was still stiff and it began to ache as he approached the site of the crash. The machine had plowed into the street at an angle, losing one of its two-tiered wings in the crash. What is that thing? The remaining wing sported a pair of smoking machine guns, one twisted nearly into a perfect knot. Thank God it loosed its bombs before the crash, thought Jonathan, thinking back to the smoldering orchard. Alisayne, who had gone ahead in her own car, was already there with Sieur Walton, Sieur Paul and Lord Graham's crook-backed majordomo, Clarissa. Sieur Paul studiously ignored Jonathan's approach. The bearded seer's eyes were bloodshot, his hair disheveled. He spoke in terse, brusque sentences to Clarissa as they examined the wreck together in company with several black-robed Al-Doshti mathematicians.

“What brought it down?” asked Jonathan as he reached Alisayne's side.

“Nothing we did,” said Clarissa. With her limp black hair, round spectacles and spindly arms she looked something like a starved spider. She rubbed her long, thin hands together. “Mechanical failure, I think. Whatever it is, it's complicated.”

“The Throne knows our iniquities!” the priestess cried. “Her judgment is upon us! Beware, those false of heart who work against Her ministry!”

“Do you have that bitch's name?” said Jonathan to Alisayne.

“Your man Avery is on it,” said the Princess.

Jonathan glanced at the milling crowd around the priestess, but he saw no sign of his spymaster. A good sign, all in all. Avery Lurier was slick as glass and cleverer than a snake. “What are we looking at, Al?” His voice was all but lost in the chaos of the crowded street.

“I have no fucking idea,” said Alisayne. She gestured toward the distant bulk of the Serpentspire with her cigarette holder. “I've ordered most of our flak guns brought to the Spire's grounds, but whether or not they'll do any good against something so fast remains to be fucking seen.” She put the plastic holder to her lips and inhaled. The cigarette's tip flared red. She looked lovely in her strapless blue dress, pinned hat and black half-veil. She wore long black gloves that went up to her elbows like a Xuli courtesan's.

“They'll strike again,” said Jonathan, watching Clarissa pick over the wreck as the mathematicians scribbled notes and the guardsmen shoved back with batons and riot shields against the roaring crowds. “What's the fleet's disposition?”

“We lost the Siren with all hands,” said Alisayne. She flicked ashes onto the street and lit another cigarette. “The Maiden and the Lord James were both damaged by machine-gun fire, but they can still fly. I've ordered everything we have left in the air spread out and placed on full alert.”

“We are sinners in a land of sin!” said the priestess, her jowls trembling.

“I want that woman dead,” said Jonathan through clenched teeth. A small voice answered from the pit of his stomach. Haven't you killed enough? But no, it's never enough for you.

Alisayne smoked furiously, tapping one foot against the blistered pavement. “Can we move it?” she said, raising her voice over the cries of the crowd.

Clarissa looked back over her stooped shoulder at Alisayne. “I can get it back to the Spire, Princess,” said the sorceress, “but it will take some time. A few hours, maybe. Less, if you can get a truck through the crowds.”

“I'll see what I can do,” said Alisayne. She dropped her cigarette to the street and ground it out beneath the heel of her shoe. “If I don't return in half an hour, you and however many others you need are to shift it yourselves. I want it inside the Spire before Lyr hits us again.”

“Understood, Princess,” said Clarissa, ducking into a shallow bow.

“The Throne knows our hearts,” said the priestess, spit flying from her lips. “She knows that we betray her, and at peril to our souls!”

Her listeners stared glassy-eyed, a crowd coalescing from the shrieking disorder.

They returned to the Serpentspire together, sitting in silence opposite one another in the back of a long, dark automobile driven by a Belfast man. Alisayne smoked incessantly. Her breath smelled of sour wine, lemons and tobacco in the enclosed space. Jonathan remembered her as she had been in their childhood, during their painful transition into the brutal Artaxi political arena. They had played on the sun-warmed rocks by the sea in the shadow of Drear's Harrow where Lady Jacqueline lay dying of fever. They had kissed there where the drainage pipes emptied into the ocean. She had been his first, though he had not been hers. He lit a cigarette and blue-grey smoke coiled around him.

“You're ugly when you mope, Jonathan,” said Alisayne as they left the merchants' quarter, drove through a Blackwall checkpoint and entered the more prosperous circumference of the Serpentspire's precincts. “Stop reminiscing. I need you here.”

“You need me nowhere,” he said, and the petulance in his voice surprised him.

She moved across the cabin to sit beside him, her thigh soft against his aching leg. Her hand fell on his wrist. “Of course I need you, Jonathan,” she said. The warmth of her breath brushed his neck and he remembered the sticky length of her against him when they had been thirteen and wild. “I've always needed you.”

Their lips met and then his hands were fumbling with her dress, pulling it up above her garters and her underthings, wet to the touch as she unbuckled his belt. He took her in the back of the car, skin squealing against leather, their breath coming hot and short as her painted nails raked his back. Jonathan grunted, thrusting against the coolness of her, the smoothness of her skin and the soft red curve of her lips. Outside, beyond the auto's tinted windows, the city raged and rioted. This is how it always was, he thought, biting the side of her neck. This is how it should have been, forever.

As they were pulling through the Serpentspire's tall gates and onto its still-smoldering grounds, Jonathan buttoned his shirt and waistcoat while Alisayne adjusted the combs and pins holding her hair in place. They passed through the lines of the flak cannons and artillery pieces Alisayne had ordered into position, now aswarm with munitions officers and slaves laboring to haul shells into place. A valet opened the car door and they stepped out into the dry, hard heat of winter in Valsir. Squinting against the light Jonathan could see the fleet maneuvering in the distance like a school of sharks. Outside the walls, cracked open by his own guns in the days before the taking of the city, lady Lyr's armies waited behind his own earthworks, expanded to accommodate their greater numbers.

You were always the strategist, Bernard, thought Jonathan as, leaning on his cane, he followed Alisayne into the shadow of the Spire and up its monumental marble steps. He turned, halfway up, to look back at the gates where Clarissa and a handful of sorcerers, escorted by a full detachment of Belfast troops, were manipulating the wreckage of the flying machine onto the grounds amidst a welter of air-warping power. He breathed the dry air. I'm going to die here. When he turned his attention back to the Spire's soaring entryway he saw Alisayne frozen in it, a slave prostrated at her feet.

“I knows only what I am told,” the slave groveled. “Lord Graham commanded this unworthy one to tell Your Highness that the Queen is alive and has broadcast her coronation to the Empire. If you wish, His Lordship invites you to join-”

Jonathan saw what was coming in Alisayne's blue-grey eyes, in the scream that stretched the muscles in her throat like cords and in the distortion of the air around her, as though some great brush had smeared an artist's oils across the world. “No!” he cried.

You're not like me.

The slave blew apart in a cloud of blood and meat, splattering the dozens of priests, merchants, officers and officials moving about their business in the Spire's entrance hall. Alisayne, smeared with blood from head to toe, stood trembling and gasping over a piled of pulped organs and splintered bone. “Motherfucker,” she said through bared white teeth, ignoring the horrified stares of the hall's occupants.

Jonathan limped up the steps as the carious aura of Alisayne's Eye faded. He gripped her arm and at once she sagged against him, just so much dead weight. His leg nearly buckled, but he bore the pain and began to half-drag, half-lead her across the blood-slicked tiles of the entrance hall. “It's alright,” he said, again and again as they passed by rows of silent, bloodied onlookers. “It's alright.”

He thought he saw Sieur Bernard's face in every glistening pool of blood.

Prophet's Tomb: Sofia II

 SOFIA

She walked above Artaxas on the echo of the continent, her feet sending ripples through the clarity of the bottomless sky. Below her the Empire lay spread out, a dagger plunging from the trackless pole down into the belly of the sea, framed on three sides by the crescent moon of the Cradle where lay the moldering cities of Moshangar, of Xul and Al-Dosht and a dozen other petty empires decrepit with the weight of ages and burdened with the jealousies of petty gods. To the west, between Artaxas and its hoary parent, lay tiny Umzad with its shores of white sand and its forests of weeping cherry trees. In the east, four hundred miles or less from Leviathan's Bay, something ugly waited on the open sea. A thousand, thousand mouths screamed up from the still waters.

Prophet's Tomb: Ysabelle I

 They said her father had betrayed King Stephen and the Holy Marshal, repaid their trust in him with cutthroats and rank treason. They said the Church and the new King, Anaias, had taken him to answer for his crimes. When Fyodor gave her the news, it was already a week old. She had thrown a tantrum in the library, refusing to continue her studies. The wonder of the Eyes, an awakening from blindness into blazing sunlight, had transformed from naked joy to the taste of cold ashes in her mouth. Her grandmother was dead, her family disgraced and in chains.

Prophet's Tomb: Ira I

 IRA

Come in out of the cold, you poor thing. How far you traveled, and that boy half-froze to death. Come in and rest, poor darling. What's your name, dear?

Prophet's Tomb Chapter III: Alisayne

The wine was a tart Rhyddish red from Lyr's private cellars, one of the last bottles from the Memorial Vintage commemorating three hundred years of Rassianus rule. To me, thought Alisayne, upending the bottle. Wine. Was there anything sweeter? A few ruby-red droplets ran down her chin, staining white skin with artificial blood. She took another swallow, and then another before she lay back in her folding canvas chair and set the bottle, now half-empty, down on the balcony floor. Glass touched tile with a distinctive clink. “Lovely,” said Alisayne.

Prophet's Tomb: Magnus I

MAGNUS

The angels came as they had at the battle of the Grieving Reach. Dragonfly wings filled the air with that dry, insistent rattle that set Magnus's teeth on edge and made his scarred cheeks ache. The eager, phlegmy screams of the drones drove needles into his ears. An instant later he saw the first of them as it buzzed over the crumbling walls of the fortress. He opened his Second Eye, embraced the flaying of his reality as the skin of the air peeled back around him in blasted curls. Beside him on the steps of the keep, Ilia did the same.   Burn, Sieur Magnus thought, wrapping the angel in memories of fire. The angel burst into flames like an oil-soaked fagot and crashed into the keep, keening in agony. It hit the courtyard dead and smoldering.

Sofia Chapter I: Prophet's Tomb

PART ONE: THE PRINCE

This place is killing me.

SOFIA

     The Rosemont waited on its hill, another moldering reminder of House Rassianus's vanished glory. Its broken towers scrabbled at the underbelly of the sky like stunted fingers. Its keep was a haunt for rats and owls, its dungeons rank and rotting. Deep beneath its centuries-old foundations, though, something waited.   Sepirahkt Rassianus. Sofia could sense him stirring at her approach, an ancient shade hung about with chains only the Third Eye could forge. Unable to kill him in the wake of her ascent to power, Eleazora had hidden him away in the bowels of his family's last redoubt. She had trusted to the fortress's abandonment and disrepair to conceal her prisoner, but somehow Sepirahkt had reached beyond the walls of his prison to the last scions of his ruined House.

     Their stolen car, driven by Sieur Magnus Blackwall, rattled along the muddy track through the woods that led up to the castle's gates. In the back seat Lord Kazimir Bastian sat with his sputtering, mumbling son, Trystan, while Ilia, Kazimir's majordomo, ran her hands over the boy's bare chest. They had taken the car from a farmer on the Iron Road after Kazimir's own had failed them two days out of Rassian, dying in a cloud of its own oil-stinking smoke like some asthmatic iron horse coughing up its lungs in a consumptive fit. Sofia, dressed only in her shift and an enormous black storm coat, sat with the disheveled Sieur Magnus in the front seat. The aging knight had not slept since the night of their flight from Rassian and the strain showed in his bleary eyes and tremulous hands.

     He's trying to prove himself to me, Sofia thought. If he keeps it up, he'll die.

     The car bounced over a rut in the weed-choked hill road, dragging a ragged scream from Sieur Trystan's throat and a muttered curse from Ilia. Lord Kazimir's usual facade of unflappable calm faltered for an instant and Sofia felt his panic, raw and immediate, before he mastered himself. I'm sorry, she thought, looking down at the curve of her belly.

     They rounded a bend in the track and suddenly the wrought-iron gates of the Rosemont were before them. They stood open on the ruins of the mercenary camp where Sofia had been held, rusted in place by the early winter rain. The ruined keep loomed over the grounds, dead ivy clinging to its walls. Sieur Magnus pulled into the courtyard and killed the automobile's sputtering engine. He sagged against the steering wheel. Sofia fumbled her own door open and stepped out into the frigid mud as in the back seat Sieur Trystan began to choke, blood dribbling down his chin. She was halfway to the yawning mouth of the Rosemont's great double doors when Lord Kazimir staggered out of the car, leaning heavily on his cane, and called out to her.  “Do you know what you're doing, girl?”

     Sofia turned. The bitter wind threw her unwashed hair across her face. “I saw him, Kazimir. He called out to me.”

     “He started this war,” cried Kazimir. “Free him and the Empire will bleed. We should have gone to Roarwater!”

     “Do I have your loyalty?”

     Kazimir's Eye snapped open and shut, and for an instant Sofia felt the bitter depth of his frustration and his grief. Then nothing. “Yes, Highness.”

     The car door slammed and Sieur Magnus stepped out, looking raw-boned and frail without his coat. “Hurry, Your Grace,” he said. “The Throne won't be far behind.”

     Sofia turned back to the Rosemont and opened her Third Eye. The First Eye drew color into the world, made luminous thought and speech, unveiled the hidden secrets of the ephemeral. Smells sharpened. Sounds echoed. The Third Eye was different. In its compass only others changed. Light spilled from their mouths when they spoke. It glimmered behind their cuticles and where their skin was thinnest at their throats and the crooks of their elbows, at their clavicles and nostrils. It was as though everyone had swallowed stars and now burned from the inside out. Sofia walked up the steps of the Rosemont, her bare feet leaving muddy prints on the stone.

     Thump.

    A heartbeat, deeper and slower than sound. It pulsed in time with Sofia's progress into the wretched grand hall of the Rosemont where moth-eaten leviathan banners still hung from the galleries and gore owls nested in the eaves. Their eyes, lambent with souls stolen from spoiled flesh, followed the Princess across the mossy flagstones. Mushrooms squelched beneath her feet. Day-old rainwater dripped from holes in the distant ceiling. Sofia turned her steps toward the dungeons and soon even the faded glory of the grand hall was a wistful memory. She picked her way down rotting staircases, along halls too black even for what sight the First Eye afforded her to penetrate. Sightless white newts fled at her approach, scurrying back into the damp walls of the fortress.

     Thump.

     Her fingers traced murals eroded by time and water into meaningless lines. She touched the rusted bars of cells that had long stood open and empty, felt beneath her feet the bones of generations of rats and mice who had lived and died in the intestines of the Rosemont without ever seeing the light of day. Where were their blind descendents now?

     Thump.

     Light revealed the head of a narrow stone stair a mercenary had once dragged her up, his lantern washing the walls in fitful light. The Throne had nearly won that day. The steps were slick with mildew-stinking moisture. Fungus sheathed the walls and grew in rash-like nodules from the low, sloped ceiling. Below, watery shadows danced and slid like grease over the fungus-eaten concrete. The chamber was as Sofia remembered it; a circular enclosure, flooded nearly three inches deep and lit by a hanging lamp that drew power from some unknown source. The marble walls were filthy but untouched by moss or fungus, the water still and dark. Opposite the stair the Door awaited, a great bronze disc fifteen feet high and just as wide. The bottommost third of the Door depicted men and women in a clawing, naked heap, supplicant beneath the boundless sky and graven with the psychotic attention to detail that betrayed the work of a Ginchori metallurgist. Water surged and crashed somewhere behind it, as though a giant gnashed its rotten teeth.

     Thump.

     At its center, revealed by the sight of the Third Eye, a soul had been joined crudely to the metal. It struggled pitifully against its bondage, firefly-small and feeble. Sofia reached out and plucked it from the door. It was warm in her hand. Fish in the river/winter/papa drank himself to death.

     Thump.

     A sigh of relief washed over the chamber. The soul's light dimmed, then went out. A moment later the door split down its seamless middle. The sound of surging water redoubled. Darkness waited for Sofia, stretching away into the distance. Darkness, cold, and the fading smell of roses.

     Thump.

Sofia stepped into the dark. Still, frigid water swallowed her to the hips. Just past the threshold of the door the chamber dropped off into a channel cut into the living rock beneath the hill on which the Rosemont sat. Sieur Magnus's coat flared out around Sofia like a shroud, its heavy oilcloth tails floating on the water's surface. In the dim illumination of the chamber's lanterns Sofia could see the barest suggestion of the tunnel in which she now stood. Its curved walls rose above her on both sides to form a tiled arch retreating past the memory of light toward the source of that vast heartbeat.

     Thump.

     Whose soul had sealed the door, Sofia wondered. She put her palm to the left wall of the tunnel. The tiles wept. Her thighs were beginning to go numb from the cold as she waded forward into the crushing darkness. The water pulsed around her feet as she made her slow way forward, palm sliding over tile, accompanied by sightless prawns and bone-white fish with staring eyes. Minutes passed, or hours, and Sofia's hand slipped from the tiled wall. She stumbled to a halt, turning in the water. Sieur Magnus's cloak dragged heavily behind her, waterlogged. She groped for the wall, her breath loud against the distant rumble of falling water.

     “They have my sons.”

     Sofia whipped around. In the glare of her Third Eye she saw the Grand Atrium of the Lysandric Palace branching from the tunnel. It was different, attuned to another age. Where Stephen had kindled flames around his seat the elegant, dark-haired woman who occupied it now sat cross-legged on a simpler throne, a bench of plain black iron set on a marble dais at the center of a reflecting pool that encircled the whole Atrium in a deep channel. Huge dark shapes swam around her and rose petals drifted on the surface of the clear water. Before the woman knelt Sieur Magnus, young and strong with a head of receding reddish hair and cheeks newly mangled. Blood stained the bandages wound round his jaw, and when he spoke it was with great difficulty.

     “I have...failed you, my...my Queen. Kvalus and Rosecrown...come.”

     The Queen rose from her throne, the folds of her white gown whispering over iron and marble. “Then we will slaughter them,” she said, her red lips trembling in their struggle to fit around the words. Infant leviathans splashed in the pool around her, sensing her fury. “Prepare the army.”

     The Grand Atrium was gone, the tunnel lightless once again. Sofia stared a moment at the place where it had been. When she reached out to touch it she felt only the smooth tiles of the wall. She walked on, shivering in the chill. Her legs and groin ached from the deep cold of the water. Once she heard scales rasping over tile as something vast and heavy uncoiled itself, then the muttering of an old man's voice, and then nothing. She hugged herself with trembling arms. Where is he?

     Thump.

     Her legs were stiffening up, her teeth chattering uncontrollably. The current had picked up speed and now dragged her forward, sucking hungrily at Sieur Magnus's coat. She stumbled down the slippery tunnel, palm sliding with increasing speed over the left-hand wall. There was nothing to grip, nothing to catch hold of. The current grew and now the roar of water crashing was clear and loud in Sofia's ears. Without warning the floor vanished and she plunged into frigid of darkness. The cold sucked the breath from her chest even as the current caught hold of her and yanked her further downward. Flailing limbs availed her nothing. She clawed at coat's buttons, fought her way free of the sodden garment and struggled for the surface. Sound returned as her head broke the water and she sucked in a convulsive breath of mildewed air. She was moving swiftly now and the roar of the current drowned out all other sounds. Every sound but one.

     Thump.

     A wan grey light built in the distance. Sofia rushed toward it, too cold to feel the shock of impact as the current bounced her off the wall of the curving tunnel once, twice, three times. Her ears rang. Ira, are you still alive? It seemed the water howled in her lover's voice. Father to her child.

     Thump.

     A waterfall. It waited ahead at the tunnel's end, a frothing torrent pouring into the dim greyness of some larger chamber. Sofia spat water and kicked with all her might, but the falls were insistent. In a stomach-roiling instant she was pulled underwater again and spat out of the tunnel into the rushing cascade. Dull roar of the falls. Her own choking screams bubbling from her throat. View of something looming in the dark, gnarled branches clawing at the ceiling of a vaulted chamber.

Impact slapped the breath from her lungs.

     Thump.

     Sofia lay gasping in ankle-deep water rushing swiftly over polished marble, her lower half pinned beneath the stunning thunder of the cascade. Aching, bruised and battered, she dragged herself from the deluge and vomited up bile. She hadn't eaten since their flight from Rassian, and what little her stomach had contained vanished swiftly in the current. She put a hand to her belly, fear tightening her throat. Are you alive?

     The echo of the crashing falls rebounded from the chamber walls. Dim grey light filtered down from grime-encrusted lamps recessed in the ceiling. In the circle of their feeble luminescence was a stunted tree, an oak with bare limbs glabrous and glistening in the light, its roots like boneless fingers clawing at the marble floor. A man hung from it, chained naked and disheveled to its trunk. His hair and beard were long and matted, hanging nearly to his raw-boned ankles. His skin, worm-pallid, was a patchwork tapestry of scars. Behind him yawned the mouths of other tunnels snaking off into the blackness.

     Thump.

     No. There was no tree. The man sat naked and defeated in an iron chair, chained hand and foot. Sofia stood, saliva dangling in ropes from her mouth as she struggled to breathe with cold-numbed lungs. In her shift, soaked to transparency, she felt a child trespassing in the grave of some dread beast. The man before her was motionless as the dead. His fingernails, cracked and yellowing, stretched nearly to the water. It took a moment for Sofia to notice his soul. Someone had yanked it from his breast and wrapped it serpent-like around his throat where it shifted its frayed and rotting coils, pulsing with a weak greenish light. Even as she watched a blunt triangular head rose from beneath the man's ear and fixed its milky eyes on her throat. I have so much to learn.

     With hesitant steps she crossed the flooded plane of marble. The serpent's eyes followed her. Its head swayed from side to side. When she grew closer she heard its teakettle hiss and the rattle of its spectral tail. Her fingers tingled. She imagined Ira dying alone somewhere in the labyrinth of Rassian's festival streets. The snake's mouth opened and curved fangs slid into place, dripping with beads of noxious light. What will happen if it bites me? There was no time to think. Sieur Magnus and the others were in danger on the surface, perhaps already under attack. Sofia met the spectral viper's lambent stare, and then without warning she lunged. Her hands closed on slick coils that twisted like bands of iron in her grasp, stronger than she could have imagined. The man in the chair jerked suddenly, dragged into wakefulness.

     Sister/lover/mirror/grief/ kill them all.

     “Areina,” he said, his voice dusty and cracked with disuse.

     With a scream Sofia pulled the snake from around his neck. It thrashed in her grip, blunt head flailing, and pain lanced up her left arm like a spear made of ice. She clung to the viper, pounding it with the hammer of her will. It hissed and thrashed, coils contracting around her wrist with crushing force. Die, she thought. The viper recoiled and shuddered, its light dimmed.

      Father left/darling/mother/roses at the funeral.

     “Don't kill it,” husked the man. He opened his mouth wide, showing greyish teeth.

      Without hesitating Sofia thrust the serpent's head into the prisoner's mouth. He swallowed convulsively, huge hungry gulps, and in a trice the snake was gone. Silence echoed from the walls, and then a wan light kindled in the prisoner's mouth. “Yes,” he said. His Second Eye opened and the air around him turned scabrous and blasted. Sofia sank to her knees, light-headed, as great roaring arcs of lightning lashed the walls. Water exploded into steam. Tiles burst like bombs. The chains holding Sepirahkt Rassianus, last living son of Ysandre, Queen of Blood and Roses, disintegrated into nothing and the sorcerer-prince stood as though he were a thousand years old, exulting in his power. He held up a fist, elongated nails scissoring the air, and the destruction ceased. Tile and stone crashed down into the shallow, swirling water all around them in a ruinous cascade.

     Sofia stared up at her uncle. The cold was creeping up her arm, making sallies for her neck and breast. She looked down with sluggish eyes and saw two needle-fine marks in the meat of her hand between her left thumb and forefinger. “It bit me,” she said, her voice slurred. The room began an awkward dance around her, lurching first one way and then another. She heard music and saw her mother, her real mother, watching her from the mouth of one of the sewer tunnels.

      “I love you,” said Naira.

     Sepirahkt gripped her wrists, his nails digging into her clammy skin. His eyes swam before hers, pools of deepest black like uncovered, empty wells. “Look into my eyes, child,” he said. His voice boomed from the walls. “Look into my eyes.”

     She did, and lost herself.