Cobweb Empire (28 page)

“Then, Your Majesty,” ventured another
advisor, this one a civilian diplomat, “we can only hope and pray
that His Imperial Majesty sends reinforcements before this mystery
of Hoarfrost’s motivation need be solved.”

“I will be praying,” the King said, “at Her
Majesty’s funeral tonight. That my late Mother might be laid to her
final rest tonight, in blessed peace, before any blood is
spilled.”

I
t was time to send
the birds.

Lady Ignacia Chitain of Balmue sat in a
small tent erected on her behalf by the orders of Duke Hoarfrost,
right next to his own greater one. They were situated on a small
rise, just outside the range of Letheburg marksmen. The snow had
started falling a few hours after midnight, and overnight had piled
on heavily all around, so that the canvas roofs of both tents
sagged mightily under the load.

It was serene and yet utterly grotesque to
be surrounded by the walking dead in all directions, Ignacia
thought—all of them remote and no longer human, and only she and
the Domain messenger boy being of the living. She
should
have been afraid, and yet somehow she had no fear—confident in
herself and her effect upon the Duke, she had no true fear of
Hoarfrost, and he ruled them all.

The incident with the knight breaching the
city siege and blasting through the thicket of the dead army was a
thought-provoking thing. Ignacia did not know what to make of it.
She had awoken from yet another brief and troubled sleep among a
crude pile of furs to the distant sounds of a peculiar commotion.
It came, not among the besieging army ranks—for the dead generally
remained impassive to all stimuli except direct commands from their
newly appointed lord—but far ahead, up on the actual battlements of
the city. She had emerged from her tent and only then observed that
someone was riding hard from the direction of Letheburg and
directly into the army, and making a significant headway.
Apparently the dead were
falling
.

What occurred next was unclear. Hoarfrost
had come outside also from his tent where he’d been brooding like a
stump, and he himself had gone very still at one point, together
with the entirety of the dead around him. And then, it was as
though a single metaphysical breath had been expelled, and they
were all released by an invisible hand. . . .
Hoarfrost’s roar of fury and impotence was enough to make her put
her hands up to her ears, and she prudently decided against
approaching him in that moment. Now he stood staring as though he
were a boulder rising from the earth, a barrel-chested monstrous
figure that had once been a man. There was something peculiar in
the obsessive way he watched the receding figure of whoever was on
horseback, cutting through the army like butter and then receding
into the night darkness of the plain, moving south.

Soon afterwards, the snowfall started.

Ignacia went back inside, huddled in her
fine ermine cloak, and slept once more, until dawn. And the young
spy from the Domain slept a few feet away, next to the warmly
covered and well-coddled cage containing his precious carrier
pigeons.

When next the lady awoke, it was to white
morning light outside, and tall snowdrifts. After a few brief
morning ablutions, she headed directly into Hoarfrost’s tent.

“My Lord,” she inquired, with no preamble.
“Did I hear something happen last night?”

The dead man turned to her, creaking his
rime-frosted limbs. Then the bellows of his lungs came to life.
“You heard indeed. Someone has made a fool of me, pretty bird.
Indeed, as I speak of birds, one such bird has flown the Letheburg
coop. A very strange feathered thing, I must say.”

“What coop?” said Lady Ignacia bluntly,
because she knew it was the best manner to take with this man.
“Please be simple with me, Your Grace, for I have no notion of what
you speak.”

“This one is a very special bird,” he said,
fixing his grotesque marbles of eyes upon her. “For she could get
into my mind, and I could
feel
her—feel her pulling me like
a fish on the end of a line. One pull and I would be no more. And
yet, somehow she let me go.”

“Birds, now fish, Your Grace? And who is
this
she
of whom you speak?”

With a creak and then a shaking rattle
sound, Duke Hoarfrost started to laugh. “You really don’t know, do
you?”

For the first time, Ignacia had a moment of
doubt, and with it a twinge of fear. This was not planned ahead,
none of this. This was an unknown factor.

Seeing her suddenly thoughtful face, Duke
Hoarfrost laughed even harder, a pumping bellows mechanism sprung
into full motion. “You need to tell your Sovereign,” he said
in-between guffaws, “that a Cobweb Bride is the least of her
problems! Death, the gallows bastard, has another Champion!”

And then he laughed again, seeming to no
longer be aware of her presence, and would not stop.

Moments later, Ignacia quietly left the
Duke’s tent. She went inside her own, and hurriedly wrote on a tiny
piece of parchment, then prodded the messenger boy awake. He took
her rolled-up note and selected a plump grey pigeon with
white-tipped feathers, trained specifically to fly to his native
coop in the Sapphire Court.

“No,” said Ignacia. “This one is too late.
The Sovereign and her armies are already on the move and the
message will never reach her. Use a pigeon that returns to
Balmue.”

The boy nodded, and took out another
creature, this one of a darker coloration. “This one, My Lady. It
will fly directly to His Majesty Clavian Sestial’s personal coop in
Ulpheo.”

“Perfect! Ulpheo will be directly on the
way, and there Her Brilliance will likely add to her Trovadii the
Balmue battalions, so it will involve a sufficient delay. Now,
attach the message and let the bird fly.”

The boy nodded, and in minutes he had
released the pigeon into the clear winter sky.

Ignacia stood looking up at it. She thought
about the contents of the note that said simply, “Hoarfrost is no
longer entirely ours. He is likely to take Letheburg within a day,
for himself. How shall I proceed?”

I
t was time to send
the birds.

The Emperor Josephuste Liguon II of the
Realm stopped briefly on his walk along the highest terrace of the
Imperial Palace. It was his favorite haunt, meticulously kept free
of the fresh powder of snow that had fallen overnight, by servants
who had swept the marble floor and filigree gilded iron railings
hours earlier.

Here, hundreds of feet above ground level,
he could see the variegated hues of whiteness in a panoramic sweep
of rooftops and cathedral spires, with the immense gilded dome of
the Basilica Dei Coello to his right, wearing an ermine hat of
snowfall, and everywhere distant rooftops and balconies of the
outlying buildings and lyceums. Far beyond to the north lay Lethe,
with its wintry forest wilderness. To the west, stretched Styx,
bordering with verdant temperate France. And directly southeast was
warm, fertile Morphaea, touching with its lower southern borders
the foreign Domain Kingdom of Balmue, and with its upper eastern
side the lofty ridge of the Aepienne Mountains and beyond it, the
Domain Kingdom of Solemnis.

Here in this spot on top all things, was the
heart of the Empire. The rest of the world radiated in all
directions around him.

The Emperor was a slight man of less-than
average height, so that his thin figure was often elevated with
curving heels in the French fashion, and attired in resplendent
finery of high Court, while rouge and powder were applied to his
face to disguise the washed out, sallow quality of aging skin.

Today was not such an occasion.

The Emperor wore an ordinary tailored jacket
and trousers, drab mourning colors, an overcoat and sensible winter
shoes. His graying head and bald spot was covered with a plain
unpowdered black wig, and his face, untouched by artifice, was
clearly that of a grieving old man. He walked slowly, leaning on a
polished walking cane, and took frequent stops to admire the view.
A few discreet feet behind him walked two of his personal
attendants and, farther back, the Imperial guards.

It had been several days now since the loss
of his daughter. After the Infanta was assassinated on the fateful
day of the Event when death stopped and
everything
began,
the Emperor had grown apathetic, finding it harder and harder to
focus on the daily routine, or to make the simplest of decisions.
And now, with news of all manner of unrest, conflict, and general
misfortune coming to barrage him every waking hour, he found it
more and more difficult to face the duties of each day.

They told him the foodstuffs were hardly in
sufficient supply to last a month at most. And then, there was
expected to be widespread hunger all over the Realm and beyond. No
fruits or vegetables reaped or grown after the Event could be
consumed by the mortal body in order to gain nourishment, no
livestock slaughtered. It was as if all living energy itself was
suspended, and would not be released into the chain of life. Only
old harvest grains, fruits, and other aged food kept the hunger at
bay.

His dead daughter had gone north to the
wilds of Lethe to offer herself as a Cobweb Bride, and nothing was
heard of her since. The Emperor tried not to think, tried instead
to look at the clear morning sky of pale blue, with not a cloud in
sight.

They told him that something was happening
in the north country, a massing of the dead under the banner of the
Chidair Duke who himself was one of them. Again, the Emperor tried
not to think, not to imagine, for it all made so little sense.

The Empress spent her time mostly in her own
quarters, working on endless, useless needlework or making
charitable visits. Again he tried not to think of his wife’s white
face purged of all animation, carved by grief into a shrunken
elderly doll. Indeed, the two of them now made a fine pair.

And the bizarre, unsettling news continued.
More recently, within the last two days, there were such
inexplicable events reported that the Emperor could not even grasp
the meaning of what was being suggested. According to so-called
reliable witnesses, various landmarks were
disappearing
from
all around the Realm. Sections of the land gone—forests, entire
portions of towns, remote settlements missing, roads abbreviated,
hills misplaced. Utter nonsense, he thought, and chose to think of
it as a mere sign of the troubled times—an escalated state of
frenzy in the impressionable minds of everyone made vulnerable by
the cessation of death to the barest hint of the metaphysical in
all things. God had abandoned them, and so did reason.

One other superstitious rumor that
particularly infuriated him had to do with a supposed young girl
from a distant northern village in Lethe who had the miraculous
ability to lay the dead to rest. Death’s Champion, they called her.
She traveled the countryside and performed miracles on old women
and pigs. Or maybe she was but an angel sent from Heaven, a
precursor of the Last Judgment. Upon hearing of this “Death’s
Champion,” he had gone into a quiet rage and forbade any more
mention of it.

But there were other things, undeniable and
real.

They told him there were new stirrings
beyond the foreign border of the Domain. Something on a very large
scale was taking place. . . . Balmue had grown so
quiet it was surely a calm before the storm. Clandestine chatter
was at a minimum, and all his own sources had gone extraordinarily
silent. Oh, how he tried not to think on that!

The Emperor took a turn about the terrace,
reaching its eastern end. It was here that Andre Eldon, the dashing
and dandified Duke of Plaimes, and Claude Rovait, the bearded and
distinguished Duke of Rovait, caught up with him. Both men were
Peers of the Realm from Morphaea, consummate diplomats, and his
finest Imperial advisors. Both also supervised a wide network of
clandestine operations, with ties all over the Domain and the
outlying foreign territories.

The men walked swiftly and bowed before the
Emperor.

“Your Imperial Majesty,” spoke the younger
man, the Duke of Plaimes, who held the secret distinction of
handling the deep cover spy network based in the Domain. “If we
might have a moment of your privacy—some news.”

The Emperor grimly acknowledged them;
motioned with a tired gesture for the assistants trailing him to
walk further back. The Imperial guards fell back also.

“Bad news, I surmise?” the Emperor said as
soon as they were out of hearing range of anyone else.

“I am afraid so,” replied Plaimes. “Today I
received a series of flower code messages from Micul Fiomarre. The
first bird brought a carefully drawn likeness of the dreaded red
rose, which means the Sovereign armies are on the march against us,
blossom opened wide, which indicates the entire Trovadii force.
Immediately after, a second bird arrived, also with an open rose,
but this one black—a somewhat cryptic message, since black
indicates death, and also a black rose is the symbol of one of the
Trovadii generals. Later, two more pigeons came in, one with a blue
fleur-de-lis which means Solemnis is on the move in the west, and
the other bearing the likeness of a green leaf, which indicates
that the Balmue border is on high alert.”

The Emperor sighed. “So, it
begins. . . .”

“Fortunately, in this we have advance
notice.” This time it was the ever-tactful and levelheaded Duke
Claude Rovait who spoke. “I suggest Your Imperial Majesty puts the
Imperial Forces on alert within the hour. And by the end of the day
we will have the entire military of the Realm ready to counter the
threat.”

“Good, yes, let us proceed thus,” muttered
the Emperor. His eyes continued taking in the wide expanse of sky,
serene and fathomless. A crisp late afternoon wind swept in sudden
biting gusts along the terrace.