Cobweb Empire (19 page)

“That is indeed a regrettable likelihood.”
Beltain nodded.

“What about fire?” It was the Marquis
Fiomarre speaking.

The King glanced at him with a brief frown.
“What manner of advice should I consider from a traitor and
murderer?”

Vlau’s dark expression flared with leashed
intensity. “I might no longer have any right to speak as a Peer of
the Realm, it is true. However I speak as a soldier—as someone who
has served in battle. In my better days, I was briefly employed in
a military capacity at the border with Balmue and my native
Fiomarre lands, in Styx. We have used fire and gunpowder to great
effect, and I myself have seen it burn through literally
unbreachable defenses, and have grown rather skilled at packaging
and doling out various intricate weapons of flames. And now I pose
before Your Majesty this question: do the dead not burn?”

“You tell me!” said the King.

“To be honest, I am not sure what happens to
them in fire,” Beltain interrupted. “We have not observed anything
particular during the battle of Merlait—at least not in any
extraordinary detail that I can recall of that hellish day.”

“Fire might be one deterrent,” King Roland
continued. “But it still brings me back to you, girl—Percy, is
it?”

“Yes, Your Majesty.” She curtsied, still
flushed red, and with her gaze to the floor, while her mind
raced. . . .

“Answer me now, Percy, how much can you do?
How many dead men can you strike down?”

“I—I am not sure.” Percy realized that her
travel companions were watching her silently—the knight, and the
marquis, and the Infanta, all who witnessed her in action, all
reluctant to give away her ability. And Grial was looking at her
with her steady dark eyes.

But she could not very well lie to the King.
And besides, there was something that made her
want
to admit
it.

“I touched three, one after another,” she
said. “And they were
gone.
Afterwards, I was very dizzy and
weak.”

The King nodded in satisfaction. “Excellent!
Just the thing we need to know! Now, how long did it take you to
recover?”

“Majesty . . . I am not very
certain, but maybe a few hours.”

“Very well. Now tell me this—does it have to
involve touch? Or can you look at a man and make it happen?”

“I have only done it by touching someone. I
am not sure how else to do it—because I must hold the
shadow
and direct it into the body, or at least it’s what it feels like, a
kind of pull—”

It occurred to Percy, as she was speaking,
that the pull she was describing was the same peculiar sensation
she’d had for the past hour. It was as though an invisible death
presence
was just out of reach, powerful and plural, and it
pressed upon her from every direction, no matter where she turned.
Just beyond reach, she could feel it surrounding her, calling her,
a billowing ocean of death shadows. . . .

It was the dead army surrounding
Letheburg.

And as this realization entered her, Percy
felt a snapping moment of vertigo, of being stifled on the
metaphysical plane—simultaneously suffocated by a lack of air and
the pressure upon her mind, and yet torn apart by the demanding
need she could feel, the hungry terrible
need
.

The dead needed her.

The King was speaking something, saying
things to her, and Percy could not hear him. She struggled to focus
her awareness upon the present location and not the many leagues
beyond in a perfect circle of all directions, as the dead stood
beyond the walls, waiting.

Dear Lord in Heaven, were they waiting for
her?

“—so that at first light tomorrow you will
go and stand on the battlements and try to exercise this ability of
yours remotely,” the King was saying. “You will make as many
attempts as necessary to manipulate the dead, cast your full
strength into the act of sending their—shadows, as you call
them—into final oblivion. I want you to enact death upon as many of
their men at once as possible. You will do whatever it takes to
make it work.”

“Yes, Your Majesty,” she replied, knowing in
those furious seconds of racing thoughts that instead she would
leave tonight—she would have to, for to obey the King and attempt
what he asked of her was an impossibility. Furthermore, she would
not be allowed to fail, nor would she be allowed to leave.

“Very good, then, girl.” King Roland Osseni
concluded in a satisfied tone. “You already served us well earlier,
and will receive a worthy reward for this and future services to
Lethe, in addition to our continued gratitude. I expect you to rest
well and early, in case something happens overnight and you are
needed—though I doubt they will attack so soon—and be ready
tomorrow, for we will test your abilities. Let us hope you prove
yourself as skillful as one could hope.”

“Yes, Your Majesty.” She curtsied again,
never looking up.

“And now, I too am weary and would like to
rest,” said the Infanta. Her travel companions found her words
curious, considering that now that she was dead, the Infanta had
always underscored her lack of need for rest. She had often told
them she no longer knew weariness, or pain, or any bodily
discomfort.

The King turned to the seated Grand Princess
with a benevolent and sympathetic look. “Of course, my dear, Your
Imperial Highness will be well accommodated.” And then, as servants
were dispatched on many errands, he added: “Naturally, because of
the unfortunate circumstances at our door, Your Imperial Highness
will have to be our guest a while longer—indeed, I would even say,
indefinitely.”

T
he rest of the
afternoon was a blur of hectic activity in the Palace, and non-stop
tolling of bells all over Letheburg.

Percy was given a small but comfortable
chamber suitable for a high-ranking servant, and told to “rest by
orders of the King,” even though it was not even suppertime. Her
room was directly adjacent to the splendid guest suite allocated to
Her Imperial Highness, who had insisted she wanted Percy nearby.
And for that matter the Grand Princess required that the Marquis
Fiomarre and Lord Beltain Chidair were also to be housed in nearby
quarters.

For the first half hour, left alone in a
room so fine that she had no notion how to touch anything for fear
of ruining the brocade or dirtying the embroidered bed coverlet,
Percy stood near the amazingly fashioned, tall windows of perfectly
transparent glass and watched the hive of activity in the Palace
square outside. She was on an upper story, high above ground level,
so the snow-covered square appeared to teem with tiny ant figures
of men in deep cobalt-blue military colors of Lethe.

They were moving at times in chaotic
disarray, at other times, perfect order. Pikemen infantry columns
marching in tight formation were interspersed with cavalry knights
in full steel-plate armor flanked by their arquebus marksmen
intended to penetrate enemy armor plate. The specially trained
heavy musketeers followed the lighter arquebusiers. Next came small
dispatches of running long-bowmen and sword-and-buckler light
infantry. They in turn were followed by supply wagons loaded with
cannonballs and barrels of gunpowder from the city arsenals, and
immense rolling cannons, all in the process of being carted to the
city wall embattlements.

In addition, civilian carriages of every
size rolled up and down the approach way to and from the metal
gates of the Palace grounds. Servants scuttled about, all of them
cumulatively pounding down the old snow into a dirty mixture of
slush.

The longer Percy watched, the more
mesmerized she became, listening to the harsh orders and the
shouts, trumpet blasts, the neighing of the armored cavalry horses
and the rattle of carriage wheels. And far out there, where the
distant walls of Letheburg stretched all around the great
perimeter, she could feel the ever-present massive
pull
of
the dead. . . .

Another half an hour later, a young servant
her own age came by with a heavily loaded supper tray, and curtsied
before Percy after depositing the tray on a table.

Percy bit her lip, feeling awkward indeed.
She curtsied back at the maid, exactly the same way, so that the
poor servant got flustered, did not know how to respond, and simply
hurried out of the room.

At first Percy did not bother to eat. She
was still full from the tea and pastries (an extravagant meal which
would have lasted her and her family for the entire day at home),
and besides, her stomach was queasy with nerves. But then she
remembered Grial’s good advice about “gobbling.”

And so she approached the food, and nibbled
a bit of whatever looked most edible, carefully avoiding what
appeared to be suspiciously fresh,
live
meat forced into a
baked pastry crust and furtively drowned in cream sauce by some
desperate royal cook who was hoping to disguise its undead
nature.

At some point, as Percy moved a dish aside,
she noticed a corner of folded parchment lying underneath. She
unfolded it with a sudden excited pang in her stomach. It was a
note from none other than Grial.

I know you can read this, dumpling
,
the note said.
Eat well, rest well, sleep early, then wake by
midnight and wait. Be ready to go with someone who will come for
you in the witching hour. —G
.

A new pang of terror mixed with relief
struck her directly in the gut. Then came pins and needles and
leeches of nerves. Percy stopped eating and had to bend over and
hold her midriff from the sharp bolts of worry-induced pain that
shot through her, tearing at her insides as though she was having
indigestion.

She was terrified, and for the first time in
her life she was on the verge of panic. Meeting Death in his unreal
Keep seemed a mild grey dream in comparison. Percy stood up,
started to pace, in an attempt to make the rending feeling
dissipate. She reminded herself it was Grial who sent the note, so
everything was going to turn out well, or as reasonably well as
could be expected under the circumstances. . . .

“Eat,” Grial had told her, and so Percy once
again turned to the tray and put foodstuff in her mouth and chewed
without tasting, then drank it down with cooling tea. She took the
parchment note and folded it very, very small and stuck it in her
pocket.

Eventually another servant came by to remove
the tray, and Percy thanked her and again forgot and curtseyed
deeply as though the other were royalty. This was an older woman
and did not get flustered at all. Instead, the maid smiled and
said, “Would you like me to light the fireplace, Miss?”

“Oh, if it’s not too much trouble,” Percy
replied, flushing. She had made a discovery that servants who
served
her
made her very uncomfortable.

But the maid smiled again, adjusted her
lace-trimmed bonnet (which Percy noted was fancier than any of her
mother’s old lace in her dowry treasure trunk at home), and soon
had a fire burning golden-orange in the hearth. The crackling
radiance brought instant cheer, and when the maid took the tray and
left, Percy felt a powerful feeling of peace come over her.

She sat down in a tall-backed wing chair,
forgetting that her grimy old burlap and wool dress might stain the
fancy upholstery, and stared at the moving firelight, her eyelids
grown heavy, with her back to the window. Beyond it, the sounds of
preparation for war and the tolling of the bells were still
audible, even through the closed window-glass. Soon, the window
turned indigo with twilight, and the fireplace stood out even more
with its aura of warmth.

Somewhere the Palace clocks struck
seven.

Percy came to, stiff and groggy, and forced
herself to rise and get into bed. She took off her soggy footwear
and old socks, and her outer dress, setting it all out to dry, and
remained in her old cotton shift that she had on underneath for
warmth, day and night. Oh, what a soft marvel the bed was! It
smelled of a perfumed garden on a warm day, a whole field of
flowers put together, and it was impossible to tell which flower
scents combined to make the bouquet.

The pillow was like a cloud, thought Percy,
and closed her eyes. Everything all around her was ethereal cloud
softness. . . . No twisted death, no war—no dead
pulling at her mind from leagues all around—nothing of the sort.
There were no other thoughts to plague her; she shut them all out
with a lingering vision of dancing orange firelight standing up
before her eyelids to overpower all with its warm serenity, letting
in only the softness and the delicate scent of those unknown mixed
flowers. . . . And then she sank into warm peace and
slept.

The next time she awoke was to near darkness
and clocks striking the midnight hour all around the Palace.
Awareness of the present moment came to her with the sickening pang
of immediacy, and Percy sat up sharply. Her movement sent lurching
shadows dancing against the walls in the low illumination of the
fireplace that had burned down to a few last sparks and golden
embers, leaving only glowing deep red coals to cast a demonic faint
glow in the room.

The witching hour!

Percy was out of bed like a coiled spring
and then looked under the bed for a chamberpot. She answered the
call of nature, washed her sleep-puffed face from the pitcher and
basin in the corner, and set about pulling on her socks and other
clothing that had had time to dry before the fire.

Any moment now, someone was coming! And then
they would run!

Percy was dressed and done with tying her
laces at her neck and sleeves and round her socks and thick woven
winter shoes, in a few breathless instants. She then grabbed her
woolen shawl and clutched it in a bundle in her arms. She was
ready.