Cobweb Forest (Cobweb Bride Trilogy) (7 page)

And then Lady Leonora, motionless as a doll in her flowing silk, opened her lips and evoked the mechanism to expand her dead lungs, and uttered in fierce gasps: “
No
 . . . not dead . . . I am
not
dead! It is not true!”

And the Count and Countess, also agitated, made exclamations, while the Countess clutched her daughter’s hand, saying, “My child cannot be dead! Look, see how rosy her cheeks are! And I can feel her heart beating, surely it is beating!”

Percy stood up and approached, then gently touched Lady Leonora’s hand also. “You are cold, My Lady. And I feel no pulse, nor hear a heartbeat. I am so sorry. . . . As for your cheeks, they are rather pale already. Any remaining pink is but the last shadow of your former health, and it will not last long. . . .”

Leonora jerked her hand away from Percy, while her death shadow flickered in response to Percy’s touch. The lady drew backward, sinking deeper against the divan pillows like a stiff plank of wood. “No!” she said again, clutching at the seat and cushions then putting her hands up to claw at her face. “No! I am not dead, I cannot be!”

“This is a terrible mistake!” the Count D’Arvu added. “No indeed, my daughter is perfectly healthy!”

“But your death is right beside you!” Percy insisted. “I can see it!”

“That is a lie!” Leonora’s fixed gaze hardened and her brows arched downward with effort. From her seated position she glared at Percy with a dark maddened expression, then looked around her at both sides of the divan, past her mother, as though searching for any sign of ghostly death in her proximity. “No!” she said yet again, her chestnut ringlets of curls trembling. “No and no! You lie now! I know not why it is that you are really here, what horrible lies you’ve brought to torment me, but you will
not
have me! I refuse! I will not die! I will never go with you!”

And with a cry, followed by some other incomprehensible exclamation, Leonora got up once again, her hands and arms shaking with awkward jerking motions, and she ran out of the parlor.

Her death shadow followed her.

L
ady Amaryllis Roulle and Lord Nathan Woult opened their eyes . . . and found themselves in a low-lit but unusually busy corridor of the Imperial Palace at Silver Court.

“Ah!” Amaryllis exclaimed, as a liveried servant carrying something in a wooden box crashed into her shoulder rather painfully, nearly knocking her against the hallway wall, and making her let go of Nathan’s hand.

“Oh, a thousand pardons, My Lady! I must be terribly blind!” the servant exclaimed in abject confusion, for his way had been entirely clear only seconds ago.

“It is of no consequence,” replied the lady with tired magnanimity, but then suffered a pang of mortification as the servant took a good look at her and noted her disheveled appearance, her horrible tangled hair, and the dirt stains on her face and dark red travel clothes.

His expression changed from groveling to suspicious and then haughty.

But then he took in the terrifying sight of Lord Nathan, wild haired, overgrown with a black beard, and even more filthy in attire. The servant’s jaw fell open, but just then Nathan said: “On your way now, good fellow! Stop gawking, scram!”

And the liveried servant fled.

The next few passerby in the hallway, also servants, heard the interaction and gifted Amaryllis and Nathan with similar glares, before hurrying away.

“Are you all right, dearest?” Nathan inquired. He considered for a moment taking the lady’s hand, but refrained.

“Dear Lord in Heaven!” Amaryllis whispered in icy fury, clutching her filthy brocade skirts. “I am mortified! To be seen looking thus, and then to be disdained by
serving staff!
Fie! I must now kill myself!”

“Now, now,” said her dear friend and companion. “Killing yourself, nowadays that is an empty threat if ever there was one, unless you’ve managed to become Death’s Auxiliary Champion while he was not looking. Considering we have been through hell and Tartarus, literally—well, at least its front parlor—I dare say no one would blame us for the stains on our clothing after days in a Chidair dungeon—”

“I do not
care!
” the lady cried. “I must be on to my quarters immediately, where I shall bathe for two days straight, have these clothes burned, the chamber fumigated, and then eat something that is not
gruel
—and you too! Speaking of fumigation!”

“Well, yes, naturally, my dear. But do you not think it might be important to attend the Emperor first and let him know what we know?” Nathan glanced at a pair of running servants that passed them just now. “Lord knows, but this entire Palace might be under siege, or worse, getting sacked this instant by that mad Goddess Persephone and her army!”

“The goddess and her army be damned!” Amaryllis hissed, and began walking in a general direction of her Palace quarters. “It can all wait till after I am fit to be seen in public. Nathan! If you see anyone we know, warn me, so that I might turn around and hide my face, and you can block me with your brute nightmarish figure—”

“Well, certainly, yes, but—”

“But what?” Amaryllis cried, turning to glare at him. “Think, Nathan, we know
nothing
. Nothing, really! What good are we to the Emperor, but to tell him that Death and a few antique Grecian gods have come to our mortal coil and are having an insane quarrel that is going to tear apart the world and us with it? Seriously? What can we tell His Imperial Majesty that will not have us made into a laughingstock worse than we already are?”

And she continued on her way.

“Amaryllis, you do underestimate what we know,” Nathan said, swiftly matching her rapid pace with his longer stride. “I really think the Emperor needs to see us now, exactly as we are—no baths, no rest.
Now
.”

“And why is that, Nathan?”

“Because,” he replied, “for once, in the greater scheme of things, we can make a difference.”

W
ithin a quarter of an hour of walking past a myriad corridors, rushing servants, and occasional harried nobles, Amaryllis and Nathan were ushered into a small elegant parlor in the Imperial Quarters of the Palace.

Here a man of advanced middle years with a dark beard met them, attired in expensive but subdued clothing. He frowned slightly, squinting at the unsightly but vaguely familiar pair—for in the dirt and disarray, the horrific stained outfits, and Nathan’s unkempt wild hair and beard he could hardly recognize two of the most foppish and brilliant young members of the aristocracy.

“Dear Heaven, is that you, Lord Nathan Woult?” said the Duke Claude Rovait eventually. “You look a fright! What in God’s name has happened to you? Where have you been? And oh, my dear Lady Amaryllis!”

The lady and gentleman curtsied and bowed before the distinguished Duke Rovait who was one of the Emperor’s closest advisors. Amaryllis’s usually pale, elfin features were flaming mulberry with a blush of mortification.

“I beg pardon of Your Grace for our dire appearance,” Nathan hurried to speak. “But we come straight from having escaped a Chidair dungeon up north where we’ve languished for days, and then Death’s Keep where we languished an unspeakable number of hours that felt like centuries. We request an audience with His Imperial Majesty, for we have news to impart that might be considered significant.”

The Duke frowned. “Go on.
 . . . Before I allow you an Imperial Audience on such short notice and at such an inopportune time, I need to know what this is about. As you can imagine, the Emperor has an overwhelming number of concerns to deal with—”

“Are we besieged?” the Lady Amaryllis interrupted. “What has happened here at Court that we have missed during our absence? Is the Sovereign here yet?”

The Duke glanced at the lady with a grave countenance. “So you
do
know that we’re at war?”

“Yes, I imagine it is the inevitable outcome of all this horror,” Amaryllis retorted.

“You claim to be newly sprung from a northern Lethe dungeon. How did you manage to get here, inside the walls of the citadel? No, there is no siege, but the Silver Court is on lockdown. No one can enter or leave without our knowledge or permission.”

“That is precisely why we must speak with His Imperial Majesty,” said Nathan.

“Well?”

“The answer is rather unbelievable,” Amaryllis spoke again. “And it involves Death—who, it turns out, is not merely an apparition but a
god
.”

The Duke Rovait’s frown increased.

“In short, we were brought here, by unnatural means,” Nathan said. “Death, who is Hades, Lord of the Underworld, sent us here—through air, or shadows, or some kind of wind tunnel—or Hades himself only knows what, but it involved neither carriages nor horses.”

“Lord Nathan,” the Duke interrupted sternly. “I am not going to pay you the discourtesy of asking if you are in your cups. What you are saying is beginning to sound like bad drivel. Is this supposed to be some kind of exquisite jest on your part? If so, it is in poor taste.”

“Your Grace!” Nathan exclaimed. “Do you honestly think I would let myself grow this monstrous beard and come to be in such a foul state merely for a lark?”

The Duke stared at both of them, glancing from one to the other with thoughtful severity, then relented. “No, I suppose not. Knowing the two of you, I must regretfully admit the possibility of what you say. But only so far! Give me something more, something tangible the Emperor can put to practical military use—”

“You require strategic information?” Lady Amaryllis said with intensity. “Well, Your Grace, here is one—our former dearest friend, the Lady Ignacia Chitain is a Balmue spy of the Domain, and has been, it appears, for years on end.”

“We are aware of it,” the Duke replied calmly.

“What? You
knew?
” The expression on the lady’s face was outrage.

“We have learned it recently,” the Duke continued. “In fact, just as our suspicions on her behalf were supported by observation, the three of you happened to disappear shortly afterward, so for a while there it did not look good for
all three
of you.”

“What?” This time it was Nathan who exclaimed. “But we’d been captured by Chidair! We had gone to play at Cobweb Brides—an idiot adventure, I admit—but it all ended in the Chidair Keep with dead soldiers taking us, locking us up, and feeding us pig slop. Amaryllis and I here had nothing to do with any of Ignacia’s treason!”

“Yes, we also know that now.”

“Ignacia has betrayed
us
, and our friendship as much as she betrayed the Imperial Realm,” Amaryllis said with cold fury. “She had turned on us and gone over to Duke Hoarfrost’s side, with promises of some kind of beastly Alliance with the Sovereign—who incidentally is immortal—”

“What?” Duke Claude Rovait stopped Amaryllis’s tirade with a raised hand. “What did you say about the Sovereign? She is
immortal?
”

“Well, yes. She is the Grecian Goddess Persephone who has apparently lost her mind—or whatever it is that goddesses possess up there in the cranial region—and it has made her commit supposed atrocities.”

“Well now, this is indeed interesting news; this we did
not
know,” Duke Claude Rovait mused. “If what you say about Rumanar Avalais is true, then it explains some things remarkably, including her uncanny charismatic influence upon so many, despite her cruelties. She has indeed been pursuing a political course of action that had no apparent logical pattern to it, and not a solid hint as to motives. Indeed, the gradual brewing of hostility between the Realm and the Domain was observed by us over the years with much puzzlement, and more and more it became a mystery tied to her
person
. We suspected sorcery and the dark arts. But now—with the cessation of death, with potions of the land completely disappearing, chaos and unrest and soon-to be universal hunger, as our meager food supply dwindles—”

“Now you have a mad goddess on your hands,” Nathan concluded with an exasperated sigh. “So, when can we expect her to besiege the Silver Court?”

The Duke watched them both with a closed expression. “That is the strangest thing,” he said. “She and the Trovadii army have come . . . and
gone
. They came upon us the night before last, arriving in the late evening from the direction of Morphaea, and they did not stop. . . . Instead of surrounding the Imperial citadel, they simply passed around us, the undead multitudes streaming outside the walls, and then continued onward, north, and into Lethe. It was as if the Sovereign did not consider the Emperor a threat at all, to such an insulting degree that she did not bother to pause and make war with us!”

“Oh, I am certain I know where she is headed,” Amaryllis said. “If what Hades said is true, then she seeks Death’s Keep and plans to take her armies and enter the Underworld—how or why, I have not the faintest notion. As for our own mortal world—I fear we are in for some very bad times.”

“Well, my dears,” said the Duke, “it appears that you will have your Imperial Audience after all.”

D
awn bloomed softly, staining the lower edges of the starlit black sky of night with mother-of-pearl at the eastern horizon over the great ancient city of Charonne.

The ethereal first light gathered its riches over the capital city and over the entire Kingdom of Styx. It pooled with broken shards of mirror-clarity in the rapidly moving waters of the dark and wide river that flowed only a mile-and-a-half west of the city walls—the River Styx that never froze, not even now, in the heart of winter.

An invading army camped on the snow-laden distant western shores of the river, from horizon to horizon, as far as the eye could see in the dawning blue twilight. Hundreds of tents had been erected, morning campfires were already smoking, and a hive of soldiers wearing the olive and black colors of the Kingdom of Solemnis moved around the tents. At even intervals all along the shoreline, the great engines of siege were lined up in monolith formations, their dark silhouettes sharp against the paling sky, their wooden towers and catapults pointing across the river at the bulwarks of the city walls where the defending cannon faced them in turn from embrasures, silent for the moment.

This was an army of mortal living men, and thus, they had to eat and sleep, and wage ordinary war. King Frederick Ourin of Solemnis, which was one of the four Kingdoms of the Domain, had sent the entire force of his battalions north, into the enemy territory of the Realm, all upon the orders of the Sovereign. They had been told to wait at the western shore of the river, to block the city from any outside access in the west, but not to engage until further orders, and not to cross Styx. This has been days ago.
 . . . And as yet, no new orders were forthcoming.

And thus the Domain army sat in readiness, while the defenders of Charonne observed them from the height of the bone-pale walls.

More than fifty feet above ground level, up on the battlements, musketeer and arquebusier marksmen wearing the crimson and black colors of Styx leaned in readiness, manning their long-muzzled firearms through every merlon embrasure and along every crenel. Behind them, amid flickering night torches, paced sergeants-at-arms and various infantrymen with pole weapons at the ready, and suppliers moved small wheelbarrows and loaded carts. At one such point near a sizeable bulwark facing west, several high-ranking officers were gathered, and in their center stood a slim youth dressed in a full suit of battle armor, his plates shining to a high polish and trimmed with gold. His crested helmet sported black and crimson ostrich plumes and his visor was raised, revealing the face of a grave and frightened youngster of no more than fourteen.