“An award for bravery and a pension?”
Duke Otto Orczy shifted uncomfortably in his throne, the view from his office overlooking the cerulean blooms in the gardens below. He wasn’t quite on his feet since the battle against the Kolonn family three days earlier; even with the very best care, the long, thin wounds all along his back and side, running from his rhomboid down to the upper thigh, refused to heal quickly. Even now, the unsightly pale scars left behind threatened to reopen constantly.
Otto Orczy hadn’t slept more than a couple hours at a time since then, constantly woken up by the need to force them closed again.
But that wasn’t going to keep him down, especially now. The Kolonn openly bared their teeth against him and tried to steal Teresa away, for what purposes he could only suspect. The city needed to know he was still in control, and he needed to stay on top of things.
That began with Captain Apostolis’ report.
“Yes, your Grace. Lieutenant Cato was an invaluable ally in the battle. If not for his quick thinking, never mind his sacrifice, I expect both myself and half of the officers would have died twice over.”
Otto fiddled with the quill nub on his desk, too numb to be nervous.
“And this lieutenant Cato, he was the one you were carrying when you arrived in the Lords’ Square?”
“Yes, your Grace. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that you noticed him. I had intended for him to make a formal audience with you once he earned our confidence in a few months, but under the present circumstances that point is moot.”
“He has your full confidence, does he?”
“Yes.” Captain Apostolis’ voice was firm and unwavering. Despite only recently recovering from his own injuries, he held himself up to full height to make this point, as if it deserved nothing less than his full dignity.
“Mine and that of all the other lieutenants, not to mention Sergeant Enzo. He virtually crippled himself in order to break the stalemate against Alidosi, your Grace. For that reason, I request that you grant him the Order of the Silver Dragon and a pension of two-hundred gold anthems a year. In addition, I nominate him to replace Vice-Captain Caselli when I leave this post.”
“You want to make Vice-Captain out of, in your own words, a cripple?”
“His recovery goes well, your Grace, and Caselli has already agreed. With some training and support, I am confident he might become as capable as I am today.”
“But he will never surpass that state, will he, Captain?”
Apostolis’ gaze flicked to the ground. “No, your Grace. Outside of an extraordinary intervention, his spiritual cultivation will never reach the third stage.”
Under any other circumstances, Otto would have already agreed, and Apostolis knew it. For a soldier, let alone a relatively new officer of whom quite little was expected, to rise to the occasion as Cato did, more than merited an award. Not only did he risk death like everyone else around him, he employed a nerve-wrackingly risky maneuver that would either kill him or severely damage his soul.
Only a true miracle, the kind that required the direct intervention of an angel or the Holy Son, could cure him, and that was rather unlikely. He survived, and he might even recover, but he would not continue to cultivate his soul. His body might reach the third stage of alchemic transformation, putting him on even ground with Captain Apostolis and Vice-Captain Caselli, but he would never rise above that. For the cultivation of body and soul to differ by more than a stage led to madness and death.
Cato had sacrificed his future potential to defend the other officers. To deny him a pension at this stage would be the height of ingratitude. Apostolis knew that, and was uneasy when the Duke didn’t immediately agree.
What the good captain didn’t know was that ‘Cato of Inillo’ was none other than Count Tenorio Kyno, the bastard of the late Holy Son Prudence IV, and one of the most despised men on Vintal. The very man who had tried to rob the Holy City’s treasury even as his own father sat on the throne, who had relentlessly insulted the Orczy for decades, who had-
“Your grace?”
Apostolis’ voice was calm, steady, and yet radiated concern. Only then did Otto realize his fists were crushing the armrests of his throne. Power was leaking from him, and blood stained the right side of his shirt.
With a muttered curse, the duke reasserted control and forced his wounds shut. Captain Apostolis was already waiting with a towel and fresh clothes.
“Apologies, captain. My wounds have taken more out of me than I expected. Let’s table this matter and move on.”
“Of course, your Grace.”
⚜ ⚜ ⚜
Archbishop Forna sat before a great work table laden with all manner of tools. Some resembled medical and surgical implements, others were of an alchemical nature, and yet others were of elusive and mystic function.
Spread out before him was the body of a coal-black raven, the very one which had saved the life of his niece from Konrad Kolonn’s spiteful attack. On the outside, it looked for all the world like a living and natural creature, but even three days after its death, it had not decayed or rotted at all. Its feathers were as hard as steel and sharp as blades, and its flesh was like stone.
The archbishop held it still with a pair of tongs, and then a great and heavy chisel crafted from green glass rose of its own accord. It cracked the raven’s body open, and showed it to be no living thing; its glossy, dark outer texture was less than skin-deep, practically a paint job over a body of hard, white clay that began to crumble and flake away the moment it was split open.
Slow, heavy steps made their way up the staircase and up to the archbishop’s laboratory door. No respectful knock or request for audience came from beyond. Duke Orczy simply pushed it open and stepped in directly, favoring his left leg.
“Your Grace, how wonderful of you to join us.” The archbishop did not rise from his stool, remove his goggles, or even face the duke. “I am glad to see that your injuries have not kept you in bed.”
“Can it, Iskander. Am I going to wait until you’re done poking into some stupid fucking bird?”
He received no answer. The archbishop kept at the worktable, chipping the strange construct into smaller and smaller pieces, each weaker than the last. After a few minutes, the raven was reduced to a black husk and a pile of white sand. But inside the chest cavity, buried beneath handfuls of chalky powder, was a single strand of raven-dark hair.
Archbishop Forna held it up to the light with a pair of tweezers, and gestured for the duke to examine it as well.
“What am I looking at?”
“This,” the archbishop intoned, as if giving remedial education to a child, “was the core component of that stupid fucking bird that saved Teresa’s life.”
“A golem?”
“Of a sort. Pop quiz, Otto. What are the three methods for instilling the breath of life in an artificial being?”
The duke’s brow furrowed.
“The miraculous word, the life-force of a living being, and… shit.”
Thwack! The archbishop struck the duke on the shin with a metal measuring rule.
“Hey! What was that for?”
“Third, the transmigration of a soul.”
Otto stepped warily outside of thwacking range and took the strand in his fingers.
“The second type, then. But aren’t those kinds of golems usually made with blood? Who’d make it with hair?”
“Blood is more potent, but for a powerful enough cultivator, a strand of hair is enough. You just need to focus energy into it before plucking it out.”
The archbishop demonstrated this very thing, concentrating for a moment before plucking a long lock from the crown of his head. Otto could feel the life energy concentrated inside the tiny volume.
Archbishop Iskander Forna, a cultivator at the fifth stage in body and soul, preparing to make the jump into the sixth stage, really did have as much power in a strand of hair as any one of the duke’s lieutenants did in their whole body.
But something didn’t quite add up.
“It’s more convenient, and maybe easier to control than a blood golem, but not nearly as potent. This-” the duke took the archbishop’s lock and poured in his own energy, incinerating it in a flash, “wouldn’t have even slowed Konrad down.”
“I see his education didn’t fail you.” Before Otto could talk back, he continued, “You’re correct. That raven was comparable to a cultivator in the fourth realm, maybe slightly below.”
A chill went down Otto’s neck. “So the person who made this-”
“Was not on the level of the Holy Son. There’s power, and then there’s technique. This strand of hair was reinforced, then charged, and then the golem grew out of it, rather than being constructed first. The outer shell resembles it exactly. This pushes the compatibility between the core and the body to the furthest point while minimizing loss of energy.”
The duke weighed the archbishop’s words. “You already know who made this, don’t you?”
“Ha! I’m that transparent, am I? Well you’re half-right. I don’t know exactly who made this, but I recognize the technique.”
The archbishop turned in his stool, removed his goggles and grinned at the duke.
“I once saw a Serene Sister create a servitor golem using this method. It was a stage weaker, and only intelligent enough to perform basic tasks autonomously, but it’s the same technique. I’d bet my cassock that this was created by a Serene Sister no less powerful than me.”
“That… that can’t be right. Weren’t they all in seclusion on the moon? And since when do they save lives instead of taking them?”
Otto knew that the Serene Sisters were elite assassins under the authority of the Holy Son. They remained strictly neutral in the struggle between Fulminous and Magnanimous, and would likely stay neutral until one candidate gained overwhelming favor. Even if some hadn’t made it back to the abbey before its gates shut, no operative of theirs would be running rogue around Anthusa. Not without telling the major families, or the archbishop, or someone.
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Seeing Konrad out to kill Teresa was bad enough. But an assassin who could go toe-to-toe with Iskander, or maybe even Ursula… even if she was on his side, he couldn’t leave her to her own devices.
“You’re bleeding, your Grace.”
His blood had already soaked through his clothes and was dripping to the ground.
“Shit. Now you tell me?”
“It’s really quite fascinating. What was the phrase? ‘Whose scourge wracks the body with pain, preparing for death?’ It’s even more impressive in the flesh.”
Otto mentally forced the wounds closed, and rapidly changed into a fresh set of clothes. He didn’t expect the angel he contracted with to remain a secret from the Archbishop for too long, but to see through him so transparently… maybe some of his grandfather’s self-cleaning robes had survived the destruction of the Holy City. That would be some consolation at this point.
“As long as you’re gawking, you might as well help me treat- hey!”
The archbishop had already pushed him onto an examination table. His hands traced the pale scars, still daubed in blood, and Otto briefly thought back decades, when they were both still students. Their tutor, eccentric and rigorous in equal measure, considered a first-hand education in anatomy and medicine an essential part of their foundation.
He’d thought it ridiculous back then, and many would ridicule these two men of high standing for behaving like doctor and patient, but you couldn’t argue with results.
“Hmmm.”
“What is it?”
“Tell me, how does this feel?”
Otto felt an electric shock run all along his side, and pain bloomed after it.
“Agh! What did you just do?”
“Hmmm.”
“Answer me, dammit!”
“Jegudiel’s power lingers in these wounds. Not only does it resist and reverse natural healing, it interferes with efforts to speed recovery and corrupts that energy, causing even more damage. You’re bleeding again, by the way.”
“Fuck. Can you…”
Otto didn’t even know what to ask.
“No. This wound wasn’t dealt by another cultivator using an angel’s power, but by the angel itself. It is beyond me.”
That was disappointing, but not unexpected. Just as a count could not override the demands of a duke, an angel of a lower choir could not reverse the will of a higher choir.
Trying to summon one of the most powerful angels from the sixth choir was immensely ambitious. Otto had very nearly succeeded, too, but the backlash from his ultimate failure was all the worse for his ambition. Out of all the most powerful cultivators he knew, almost none had ventured above the fifth choir. While the archbishop still kept the identity of his own contracted angel secret from even his close friends and allies, Otto gathered that it wasn’t from a very high choir.
Even so, his skill and ability in commanding that angel’s power far surpassed that of himself or Konrad. In contests between cultivators, choirs has their own suppressive effect, but that counted for little if you couldn’t marshal that power to good effect.
“Will it ever heal?”
The archbishop chuckled.
“Yes. He wants you to struggle, I’m sure. To toil. You’ll have to work back up to the fourth stage from the bottom of the third, and it’ll be twice as hard as before.”
All of a sudden, Otto wasn’t looking at the face of his childhood friend, which had always looked faintly ridiculous in the archbishop’s gown and tiara.
He was looking at someone far older and more experienced, with profound wisdom and confidence. He looked like priests looked when he was young, before he knew for himself how corrupt they were.
“If you can climb that mountain again, Jegudiel will welcome you back with open arms. I’d wager that when you achieve the fourth stage of alchemic transformation, your body will see an even greater increase in strength and durability than normal. Until then, remain vigilant. This is your own journey, and I can’t help you with it.”
Otto took in these words and gathered his courage.
“If you won’t help me with this, then-”
“No.”
“I didn’t even-”
“I know well enough. You want me to help you kill Tenorio Kyno. I won’t.”
A cold fury leapt in the duke’s heart.
“Why the hell not? You saw him yourself, that night. He’s crippled. You could crush him like an ant!”
“So could you, Otto. Even with your wounds, I’m sure you could take him down without much worry, even without the entire army you command. So why not do it yourself?”
“You know damn well why.”
Otto hadn’t told the archbishop about Apostolis’ report, but there was no getting around certain brute facts. Kyno had clearly adopted some new identity, for what reason he knew not, infiltrated his army, gained the trust of his officers, and then… sacrificed his future cultivation to further Otto’s cause? It had to be some bizarre plot gone awry, but the fact remained that the entire Orczy force in the city now held up ‘Cato of Inillo’ as a great hero. If he just marched up and executed the bastard immediately and explained afterwards, it would be a tremendous blow to morale. Even if Otto revealed his true identity and recounted every single one of his crimes, the same men who traded stories about Kyno’s iniquities in taverns the night before would not take back his honor so easily. They might demand that Otto give him a pardon, show mercy.
That was not a tolerable outcome. The bastard Kyno had to pay for his crimes.
“Right before I passed out,” Otto began, “I saw you go up to him. Even before going to Teresa, you walked right up to him, and you did nothing. What stopped you?”
“Besides the scandal that would rise if I slew an injured soldier of yours as he lay in your captain’s arms?”
“After everything he did to Julia-”
Otto’s breath stopped. An immense weight bore down in him, and it was all he could do to stay conscious and keep his wounds from reopening. The archbishop lifted his head by the hair and screamed in his face.
“Do you think my rage is any less than yours, Otto? Do you think I enjoy being motionless as that ruinous bastard walks free?”
The weight lifted as swiftly as it came, and it left the duke gasping for air.
“Do not mistake control for dispassion. I did not go to him because I was tempted to splatter his brains across the stones.”
He stepped back to the table and lifted the raven-dark strand of hair to the light.
“I went because this golem was keyed to him. It was made by someone else, but it was meant to protect and obey him.”
Otto gasped, choked, and laughed a shrieking hyena laugh.
“So he has another damn backer? Who? How?”
“I don’t know,” said the archbishop, winding the strand around the needle of a compass. “But I’m not leaving this up to chance.”
He intoned a prayer and breathed onto the device. The needle spun around and around, and then slowed, jerking hither and thither, until it settled nearly due north.
The two men looked at it with some doubt.
“Are you… are you sure it worked?”
“Yes,” said the archbishop, with rather less confidence than the word demanded. He shook it from side to side, yet it remained fixed in that direction, just a degree off magnetic north.
Right towards the Holy City, both men thought.
⚜ ⚜ ⚜
Aseneth snapped to attention, her eyes pulled directly south.
She wondered what trouble he had gotten himself into that wound up destroying a servitor with the power of a fourth stage cultivator, but her curiosity would have to wait.
The ruins of the Holy City lay all around her, choked in gray ash and the plague’s oppressive weight. It had gotten stronger and stronger the closer she had come to the city. The water was foul, the land was lifeless and dry, and no animal from the fly to the field mouse lived where it stalked. If she took so much as an unguarded breath here, never mind trying to gather energy, the sheer density of the plague would wreak havoc in her soul.
She had learned a great deal more about it on this journey. This was a pestilence without equal, one which infiltrated the body through the soul and might lie dormant for any period of time before erupting, and unless the soul itself was purged no recovery, no matter how seemingly complete, would ward it off or provide resistance. Some people it killed straight away, others it tormented in waves. It was fickle in the extreme, and she had yet found no pattern in who was struck down, who suffered, and who was spared. No pattern in the strength of the body, the soul, in the saintliness or iniquity of the sufferers, in their habits or their class.
But she knew one thing for certain. It was still far from its worst point.
It was like a living creature, and the Holy City was its ruined lair, but so far it had only made brief forays out. It was spreading far, far more slowly than it might choose, and the greatest mass was still centered here.
So Aseneth wandered the ash-choked streets, saw where statues had been cut from their pedestals, where great manors had been forced open and looted, and where the battle between the Abyssinian invader and the city’s defenders had left wounds, great gouges in the earth, lightning strikes and floods.
It had all happened without her, and without her sisters’ intervention. When she came at last to the shell of the Sanctum Summum, she felt rage and despair in equal measure.
This great palace of faith, this place she had dreamed of visiting for years, was torn apart. Its titanic cupola lay in pieces three blocks away, its towering dome was shattered like an egg.
At the edge of her awareness, the demon returned her emotions in deceptive empathy.
There were many ways to cultivate. The most common, orthodox fashion was to shape the soul into a vessel, a home, really, for a higher being to inhabit. Angels could dwell inside and offer their host a part of their power, though witches and diabolists invited demons instead.
But this had its own drawbacks. Both the power a cultivator could display and the difficulty of improving their skills was directly related to the nature of the being they invited. On top of that, any mortal who dwelt with an angel and thought they were in charge was a fool indeed. No small number of foolish cultivators had contracted with angels whose temperaments proved incompatible, or whose principles turned out to be extremely restrictive, and they might lose access to that power for great spans of time or even be punished by their patron.
The Serene Abbey instead taught its disciples to form their souls into a net, flexible and strong, with which they could catch a spirit, bind it for a time, and let it go. While it required more skill and led to great peaks and valleys in power over a lifetime, the benefits of versatility could not be denied, and the experience of catching and releasing many angels over time gradually lent the practitioner an innate power that could stand against bound angels.
The biggest risk, however, so dangerous that only groups like the Serene Abbey were allowed to practice this method, was the risk of possession. Not only might a Serene Sister be deceived and catch a demon instead of an angel, but without a higher being dwelling inside them permanently, they became extremely desirable targets for demonic possession if they were injured or emotionally compromised.
No surprise, then, that in the days it took Aseneth to reform her body after crashing to earth, a demon had possessed her.
She tried to avoid thinking too deeply one what she had done under its influence, even as it had healed her wounds and filled her with the energy she needed to explore the Holy City. She repudiated it, and used that energy for good purposes.
But the damn thing just wouldn’t go away.
It followed her around like a lost puppy, filling her dreams with scenes of madness and drunk revelry. No matter how many times she recited scripture and prayed to the saints and tried to exorcize it, it just came back.
She already unleashed her power and vaporized her surroundings in twenty paces. That didn’t stop it. Maybe a few more good explosions would do the trick, but she needed badly to conserve what resources she had.
So she just had to put up with the damn thing, and keep up her guard no matter how innocent it appeared.
She was so busy ignoring it that she almost missed the figure hiding in the doorway of the Sanctum Summum.
He melted out of the shadows like a snake, coiled and full of cold aggression. His clothes bore the insignia of some aristocratic house. But which one? Aseneth cursed her ignorance on the subject.
But most sinister was the way the air moved around him. He seemed to breathe with his whole body, the plague-laden air passing through him without harm.
“Greetings, friend. How shall I have the honor of addressing you?”
His words were calm and his face composed, but Aseneth still felt a powerful killing intent pointed in her direction. Fourth stage, and no slouch within that realm. If she could call on the power of an angel, no match for her. But without that, and with his strange resistance to the plague… she wasn’t quite so sure.
“I am Aseneth.”
He blinked. Slowly.
“Lady Aseneth, of no place and no family?”
Best not to lay all her cards on the table. “You have me at a disadvantage, lord…”
“Michelotto. Of no place nor family.”
She’d have to look up that insignia later.
“May I ask, lord Michelotto, what brings you to such a desolate place? I cannot imagine that you live here.”
He chuckled.
“No indeed, lady Aseneth. I am merely passing through on business. In fact, I must be gone from here shortly.”
“That is a shame, my lord. This is my first visit to the Holy City, and I would have liked some directions.”
“I am afraid there is not much to see, my lady.”
“There must be something to demand your business here, I am sure.”
Whatever business this lizardy man had in the ruins, she was certain it was related to the plague.
“Well said, my lady. My time is short, but I suppose I can delay just a while longer. I might even show you around, if you do me a favor as well.”
“What favor might that be?”
“You have the scent of someone I knew.”
The wind picked up, and Aseneth felt the air swirl about him in rings.
It was the plague. Not only didn’t it touch him, he controlled it as easily as other cultivators controlled the flow of energy in their own bodies. Here, in the ruins of the Holy City, with the plague weighing heavy around them both, it was a formidable weapon. Even if she allowed the demon to possess her again, a fight would be a close thing.
Those serpentine eyes shone in anticipation.
“Tell me how the two of you met. In exchange, I can offer a little enlightenment.”