Cato descended into the humid and stinking dungeons beneath Castello Beroli. Remiro was in front, and Father Andrea behind him, conducted by Beroli guards.
They had been in Beroli for just over a week now. The people of Inillo were desperate to rest after over a month on the road, but the gate guards had turned them away almost immediately. They were far from the first refugee group to come from the direction of the Holy City, and many of those had one member or another infected with the plague. Combined with the Inillo caravan’s huge size, Cato wasn’t surprised that the city lord was unwilling to let them in, even after proving that nobody in the caravan was infected.
He was fully prepared to have the people rest for a few days outside the walls, buy and sell what they could from other refugees and the guards, and continue on their way. But lo and behold, the same evening they arrived, the gates opened and the guards conducted the people of Inillo, and them alone, into the city. They had even been personally welcomed by the city lord, and he permitted them to dwell in the city for as long as it pleased them. There were empty homes throughout the city, belonging to those who had fled further from the Holy City or died of the plague.
It was grim, but Cato accepted. His baptisms and purifications had become part of the caravan’s routine, as people continued to be infected and reinfected. They had passed by countless smaller settlements on the road crawling with plague victims, and seen firsthand how deadly and gruesome it was.
Yet nobody from Inillo died. As far as they could tell, none of them were even touched by the infection, though Cato knew otherwise. It took a few days to incubate and pervade the body before rising all at once, as if without cause, with black buboes growing on the body and a horrible hacking cough filling the lungs. So long as he purified the people regularly, they would be safe. They would never even know.
The people of Inillo made the connection anyway, and quite quickly at that. This only reinforced their belief that he was a living saint sent to protect them.
Cato was quick to lay down the law: they could not call him a saint in front of outsiders, or otherwise credit him with their immunity to the plague. It was quite enough when Inillo identified him as a member of House Gulphay and made him their new leader. If he walked into a city and people thought he was a living saint, there was no telling what would happen. Father Andrea had made it abundantly clear that the church was filled with corrupt priests who might try to co-opt him to their own ends, or try to have him killed if they realized his true power. Beroli’s Lord Vicar Phaero, wielding both holy and secular power, was almost certainly one of these.
Instead, he was now Cato of Inillo, the illegitimate son of the late Baron Inillo, entrusted with the leadership of his father’s subjects. Noble bastards were by no means unusual, and in the absence of other children nobody would look at him askance, especially with Remiro and Andrea standing by him.
That was why the Beroli guards bowed and addressed him as ‘your Lordship’ while they led him to the cell where one of his subjects lay beaten and bloody.
Cato felt the blows from far away earlier, repeated and brutal strikes with clubs on the back and sides. The guards were shocked when he appeared at the site of the beating just minutes later, but he was too late. Young Girolamo, a stout and headstrong boy of fifteen, was walking alone with a bag of silver after selling much of Inillo’s remaining flocks and some of its luxuries to the merchants of Beroli. According to the guards, he had been drunk and picked a fight with some local boys. He didn’t believe that for a second.
Girolamo lay on his less injured front, his hands and feet manacled, on the wet and dirty dungeon floor. He stirred as Cato pulled the clanking cell door open, and wept pitifully as he looked upon his lord with a bruised and swollen face.
“Turn away.” he didn’t even look at the guards, but his meaning could not have been more clear.
“With all respect, your Lordship, our duty requires us to-”
They were struck silent by a rising power in the cell. Goosebumps spread across their flesh and their animal souls quivered in the face of what they suddenly saw as a vicious predator.
They turned around without protest.
Myshkin had learned that little spell to scare off wolves and bears that might hurt his flock. Cato had learned it from the shepherd over the course of a few days, and found it served his purpose just fine. He had even gotten enough practice to direct it towards certain targets instead of enveloping the entire space.
Father Andrea pulled out a clean robe as Cato and Remiro stripped the bawling boy out of his clothes. His ragged tunic was stuck to his ruined back with crusted blood, and even with Cato taking away some of the pain, tearing the fabric off was agonizing.
“My lord…”
“Be quiet, Girolamo. You’ll be fine.”
“I didn’t want to fight.”
“I know.”
“They called you a… a…”
The boy’s words sank away behind tears. While the guards looked away, Cato washed the wounds and gave him water to drink. Slowly but surely, they closed, and Girolamo’s breathing stabilized. He was fast asleep, and would wake up several hours later in a soft bed with his family. They wrapped him in the clean robe to hide his closed wounds, and Remiro carried the boy in his arms.
“Where are the bastards who did this?”
The guards looked ready to give him more lip, but on meeting his eyes thought better of it.
“They were released a little while ago, your Lordship. Master Vanazzo demanded their release into his custody.”
Cato had been at the dungeon entrance almost as soon as Girolamo was taken in, and was forced to wait for hours before the guard let him in. Nobody else had been taken in or released in that time.
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“And what kind of whoreson is this Vanazzo?”
That really took them aback. Cato hadn’t had much occasion to swear in the weeks since he arrived in this new world, but found that, even as the language came naturally to him, profanity was especially easy. The legacy of his body’s old inhabitant, he was sure.
“Master Vanazzo is the chief architect of Beroli, and his patron, Lord Maleffi, sits on the council!”
“Your boy attacked a group of bricklayers who were taking a rest from the noonday sun. I expect Master Vanazzo took this as a personal offense on the part of your Lordship.”
It was a load of utter horseshit. Cato could see it in their eyes. As if there was construction going on in a city halfway abandoned which had closed its gates to virtually all refugees. As if Girolamo had gotten drunk on the way home and picked a fight out of nowhere with older boys that outnumbered him six to one. As if those bricklayers had gotten arrested at all.
“My boy, as you call him, was carrying a bag of money. I’ll have it back on his mother’s behalf.”
“I’m afraid that’s not possible my lord. It was confiscated on-”
“ON WHOSE ORDERS, PRAY TELL?”
He didn’t yell those words. He hardly whispered them. But they filled the dungeon like a thunderclap, infused with Cato’s inner power. The guards fell back as if struck and their hands went instinctively to the hilts of their swords.
But they hesitated. These were men who had gone a long time without having to do more than threaten people to get their way. They weren’t prepared to fight at a moment’s notice.
Whether it was really him, or the old habits inscribed in this body, or both, Cato was prepared, and with the waves of power cascading out of his body, thick as water, made sure they damn well knew it.
“O-on nobody’s orders, your Lordship. It’s s-standard procedure.”
More bullshit.
“Then I’m sure you gentlemen can do me the favor of letting procedure slide just this once. Or do I have to take this up with the Lord Vicar?”
The guards bolted and had the silver in Cato’s hand within the minute. He had learned how this world worked. Everyone spoke of justice and duty and honor and codes, but the people who actually stuck to those were rare as hen’s teeth. It was all about who you knew, who you served, what they let you get away with, and who they would protect you from. There wasn’t even a pretense of equal justice. If the guards offended him, Cato could have killed them and gotten away with a formal apology to the Lord Vicar. And they knew it too.
To actually seek justice and hold duty above the interests of your faction and yourself? You’d have to be a saint.
Or you’d have to be Cato, bound to his word by a force beyond his comprehension.
He took one of the coins and threw it directly at a guard’s forehead, where it left a burning red mark.
“Take this as thanks for your prompt service.”
Walking away back into the sunlight, hearing the guard kneel down to pick it up off the ground, Cato felt very good, in a very, very bad way. A familiar way.
Whoever used to inhabit this body was a real bastard, and it was starting to rub off on him.
⚜ ⚜ ⚜
A ways from Beroli, the sounds of music and merriment emanated from the half-lit shell of a ruined castle at dusk.
In the face of an incurable, deadly plague, no two people reacted in quite the same way. The threat of a sudden and gruesome death which might never come to pass was a test of the unpredictable and innate mettle of a man, like the hidden fault lines in a gemstone revealed only by taking a hammer to it.
Most fled the source of the pestilence as quickly as possible. Some were cautious and tried to take their possessions with them, while others declared that material things were a weight upon the soul and fled at the first light.
Some thought that the plague only killed those with sin in their hearts, and committed themselves to fasting and isolation in a hermitage. Alas, all the good hermitages were very suddenly full.
Others thought that the living and the dead were predestined, and this was a sign of the end times. The only remaining commandment was to enjoy the fleeting pleasures of the earth before they were all too suddenly ripped away.
Many dozens of this latter sort had gathered in the castle ruins outside Beroli. They had taken all their worldly luxuries, all the finest food and wine they could procure, and hid themselves away to enjoy life in each other’s company. It goes without saying that these were the wealthy and the powerful, including the lesser baron on whose land the old fortress sat.
“And so it was that Ser Cipollini lived and died, and became known far and wide as a saint in the manner you have heard!”
The assembled revelers, clad in their brightest and costliest clothes upon the naked ground, cheered on this most creative story of the murderer and fraud who became a saint. They were gathered around a great bonfire, with the music of harps and mandolins and hand drums echoing over the crumbling stone. Yet other revelers danced around the fire, and others wandered off into the darkness for their own amusements. But the chief of the revelers, her head covered in a crown of laurel leaves, sat on a block of stone covered in blankets and cushions. Each day the revelers appointed a monarch from among their number, selected by the previous ruler, whom all would obey and was tasked with directing the day’s diversions.
The queen tossed a glob of Abyssinian honey cake at the clever storyteller, who caught the sweetmeat in his mouth to the delight of the crowd and gave his monarch a mock bow.
“Your tale delights us, dear Ardo, and delights us more than any other we have heard tonight. I would like nothing more than to take you to my queenly chambers and heap many royal honors upon you.”
The revelers hooted and hollered and whistled. Some, however, seemed distracted by some happening on the other side of the fire. Rude. This was her big moment. She stood tall upon the stone block and orated, hand over heart.
“However, night has come upon us, and I must pass on my throne to another worthy of its weighty responsibilities.”
Cheers again, but quieter. What in the world was distracting them. She yelled out to get their attention.
“I wonder, who will I crown to be our new ruler?!”
Then she saw it. Coming from out of the darkness on the other side of the fire came the figure of a nude woman, but not one she recognized. Her dark hair was long and wild, and she was covered all in soot and dirt.
The revelers were quiet. Shameless though they all were, there was something about this newcomer’s hard, blank stare that made them turn away their faces.
“Who are you?”
She continued forward, right toward the queen.
“What are you doing?”
She did not answer, but she stepped directly into the burning bonfire. The revelers screamed but amidst the flames she continued forward.
The queen saw that she was not hurt. The flames danced around her body and lit it gloriously, but did not burn. She was like a living storm. A god in the flesh.
Still in the flames, just a step away from the queen, this newcomer held her gaze. More sure of anything she had done in her life, the former queen, whose name was Annetta, took the laurel leaves from atop her head and placed them on this newcomer. Her new queen, beautiful as the dawn, terrible as thunder. The laurel crowned her head and did not burn.
The revelers came and bowed before their goddess.