And there we stood
Watching her burn
All we’d built and all we’d hoped
Watching her burn
Till the dawn star rose keening
We watched the world we knew blow away
Spring 43 (afternoon)
Crammed in the middle of a constable wagon, handcuffed between a prostitute and a mugger, Valkyrie experienced the sinking dread of reality setting in.
Her name and her face? Known.
Her handcuffs? Immune to every fantasy.
In her head she rolled back off the cart, darted into the crowd, and vanished like a shadow…
But the real girl instead hunched under a constable’s watchful eye, listening to the clop of another officer behind the cart – a man armed with a gently swaying rifle.
Who am I kidding? I can barely walk.
Her stomach curdled, and no one offered a word of consolation or a sympathetic smile.
The wagon driver blew his whistle, clearing traffic into the Conclave square. Foot traffic yielded, but a noble car rumbled along uncaring into their path.
The butler gets out. They shout. The other guards hurry forward. Let there be a fight; a commotion; an explosion!
The driver blew his whistle again, and the noble car begrudgingly pulled to the side.
“Where would I even go?” Valkyrie wondered. Would she endanger Katherine and Lyla? Run for her mother’s apartment, surely watched? Or try to make it the miles to Sevensborough on her bleeding feet?
The wagon rocked, tantalizing her with illusion of freedom.
But the real girl’s butt remained frozen to her seat.
“Damn potholes,” the driver groused, working the wagon over a deep one.
Bouncing, Valkyrie glanced up. On return to the Conclave Square, the café patios where she once gossiped with Lyla were a foreign and distant shore now. The cheerful murals rang full bitter, an absurd mockery jingling in time with her handcuffs.
Heavy scaffolding and tarps covered the east-most corner of the Conclave, slated for repairs.
“Repairs – for the Conclave?!”
The tarps were cinched tight by hemp and post, smothering the building too close for any workers to wiggle beneath. Canvas pretended to normalcy, but it hid the unthinkable beneath a few inches of fabric…
“Settle down,” the constable in the cart warned.
“Since when did the holy Conclave need a touch of spackle?!”
“Settle down or I’ll settle you,” the man warned, hefting his club.
None of the others in the wagon objected to the suggestion that he might beat a wayward child whose only mistake was to draw the ire of the church.
She paused in her thought, waiting for Rie’s riposte.
Her passenger did not deign to respond.
She was truly alone.
The wagon rattled onwards, turning north for 1540 Conclave Square.
The last stragglers of lunch continued to chat, laugh, and gossip over the radio on the café patios.
No last-minute rescue. No demon trick. No sudden stay of appeal…
The wagon dipped, taking the service ramp into the shadow of the skyscraper.
“Oh…Oh, Stormmother,” she whimpered.
As they pulled up to the unloading dock, the extent of her plight finally hit home.
She hated that she cried as they unloaded her like so much cargo. The first sorting was a blur of despair: hard chairs, names called one by one, and hiccups like a seizure wracking her frame. Quivering, she did not notice the existence of two categories – those sent to constables and those taken by priests.
For the first group, proceedings were orderly and practiced.
For the second, names were called and the victim vanished.
At length, only Valkyrie remained.
An elderly woman in stiff constable blues marched into the receiving room, clipboard tucked under her arm. Her grey hair was pulled back into a bun nearly as severe as the disapproval etched across her cheeks, and she regarded Valkyrie with the cold disregard of the righteous.
“Valkyrie Osh!” the woman called.
“I’m the only one here, you prune!”
The woman marched across the waiting room and belted Valkyrie across the face with the clipboard. “You will answer to your name!”
Shock as much as the blow toppled Valkyrie from her chair.
“Valkyrie Osh,” she repeated.
Reeling, Valkyrie touched a hand to her throat and shook her head.
The woman sneered. “We have no sense of humor for a little girl’s games here, Miss Osh. You will learn swiftly. On your feet!”
Valkyrie stumbled to her aching feet, and the woman seized her by wrinkled talons. Girded by the arrogance of her position, the woman dragged her through processing at a merciless pace. She caught only a few glimpses of clerks taking testimony; holding cells full of drunks and thieves; a kitchenette with stale coffee and teenage boys lounging beside a rumbling refrigerator…
Sevensborough boys? Valkyrie wondered.
…and finally a locked elevator.
A hundred feet down the left hallway, the girl spied the edge of reception, its wilted ferns, and its petitioners waiting in hardbacked chairs.
A hundred impossible feet to freedom.
“How can such a horrible place be so mundane?” the girl whispered to herself.
“We have anticipated your presence for some few weeks now,” the woman said, calling the elevator. “I expect that you will comport yourself to the highest standards.” Her talons squeezed tight. “You will answer questions promptly, address your superiors as Madam, and bow your head for prayers from now on!”
From now on…
She dragged Valkyrie into the elevator. “Is that understood?”
Valkyrie nodded.
The constable snatched her by the roots of her hair and bent her backwards until her head touched the back of the car. “I said – is that understood?!”
“Y-yes, Madam!” Valkyrie helplessly mouthed.
“Tch. You may regret that silence. Such insouciance is typical of your type. Politeness is like a muscle. It becomes easier with practice. A pity that heathen mothers are too busy teaching their children to sway their hips for false gods.”
You know nothing about us! Nothing but your own rancid vision!
The woman squeezed her nails into Valkyrie’s scalp. “You will see, child. We will break that profane hold on your soul and see you delivered to God’s embrace.”
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From within, she heard someone mull to themselves.
‘Better dead than sullied’
A foul Song she cherishes
“Rie! Pontificate later! Do something!”
Yet what could the embers of a vanished demon accomplish?
The constable dragged Valkyrie from the elevator into a somber hallway. Scrolls and paintings of the Catechisms lined the walls, and Keepers of a bygone age judged Valkyrie with every step.
A world once burned, now groveling to Fire like a beaten wife.
The woman stopped Valkyrie before a set of doors and knocked. “Begging your pardon, Your Grace, but I have secured the Wavespeaker’s girl.”
“Bring her in, Margaret,” Angela Cecille called.
The constable dragged Valkyrie through the stiff doors and into the Inquisitor’s sumptuous office. Cecille scribbled in her notes; without raising her head, she gestured towards a plain chair before the desk.
Margaret dropped Valkyrie in the seat and closed the doors with two firm thumps.
Given the meager chair, Valkyrie could barely see over the desk. A fragment of metal poked into her thighs through the rumpled cushion.
Still writing, Cecille said, “You will have to forgive the sparse welcome. We were not planning to see you for another three days.”
The girl swallowed hard. They knew? Well, of course they knew! It is a public event. Did they plan to bring a constable platoon?!
Or was this a confidence game, no different than Conner’s little tricks?
“How did you find her, Margaret?” the Inquisitor asked.
“Picked up just south of Sevensborough.”
“Ah.” Cecille nodded for her desk. “Stirring trouble where the law will not follow. But that wasn’t your base of operations, was it?”
Valkyrie fixed her eyes on the carpet and watched Cecille’s feet beneath the desk.
The Inquisitor wore a pair of slim black heels, open across the top to reveal the woman’s veiny skin.
“I asked a question,” Cecille asserted quietly.
“She is pretending to be mute,” Margaret reported.
“Is she now? Then perhaps she has yet to realize her predicament. Fetch her file, would you?”
“Yes, Your Grace.”
Margaret dipped from the room, and Cecille continued to write.
Valkyrie found her eyes dry, the tears wrung to their bottom for now.
At length, the Inquisitor finished her notes. Sighing, she took a sip of her tea, leaned back, and regarded Valkyrie with the cup in her hands. “You’ve had a busy Spring, haven’t you? Looting the Conclave like a brigand; stealing Lee’s papers; enflaming all manner of sedition. Did you know that the Wavespeaker has made several trips to Sevensborough this season?”
She blinked several times. Several times? Once to deliver her letter, obviously, but beyond that?
Cecille smiled. “That one is news, I see.”
Outmaneuvered, she flushed guiltily.
Margaret returned with the files. Opening the envelopes, she laid papers for Valkyrie’s inspection: a litany of testimonies, timelines, and accusations from one end of the desk to the other.
Eyes flicking back and forth, Valkyrie scowled at the accusations. Traffic jams, petty thefts, heretical statements! Throwing the book, the appendices, and the podium at me!
Cecille laughed. “Oh, such a pout! You aren’t used to having your actions come home to roost, are you, dear?”
“Sod off. You don’t have the right to hold me!”
Margaret raised a hand, but Cecille waved her back. “Never fear. I can read her lips well enough. ‘You don’t have a right to hold me’, correct?”
Shocked, Valkyrie bit her lip. Conner had once warned her that Inquisitors knew tricks like lip-reading, but…
But I never thought I’d face one down except as the clever fox.
Cecille smiled, well familiar with such protests. “Spoken like a little noble. Did Alisandra quiz you on the spells of House malfeasance? ‘Speak to my lawyer’ and ‘lodge a complaint with the Conclave’ are both quite popular. Magic words that conjure an army of little paper pushers to clog the works.”
She gestured, and Margaret shoved Valkyrie back against the hard chair.
“They always come in so confident,” Cecille continued, the humor draining from her face. “Always burst down the door ready to inform me of the natural order of the universe.”
Margaret’s fingers dug into the girl’s collarbone.
“Ah, but then the doors close…and they start to notice my cheerful smile before their onslaught…”
They strut in here
Never realizing who controls the doors
Valkyrie heard the echo clearer than the words. In those echoes, saw herself as Cecille did: a lost lamb, pitiable, on the verge of unrecoverable. Something to be bent before the three circles of Flame or broken and discarded.
“That is when I have Margaret close the doors. I lean forward…I smile sweetly…and I say…”
Cecille leaned forward; she smiled sweetly.
“I am the Grand Inquisitor, my dear. I answer only to God.”
A quiet terror sprung from the depths of Valkyrie’s mind.
Am I going to die here?
In this place where the law no longer reached.
The Inquisitor watched the girl’s face pale by degree and nodded in satisfaction. “Fear is the first step to redemption, dear. We start with fear for the flesh so that we might teach fear for the soul.”
Shackles of fear to mute the inner Song, whispered Rie, disgusted. Do we behold the Art of man?
Rie. Please. Help me.
But she was gone again.
“Your own mother was excommunicated for her conduct before the Keeper. If she had feared for her own soul, she would have donned sack cloth and undertaken a barefoot pilgrimage. Instead, next we know of Belle Osh, she returned home a traitor to her hearth and kin.” Cecille sighed. “How swiftly the rot spreads…”
Clenching fingers tight in Valkyrie’s collarbone, Margaret added, “T’was your mother’s delegation that carried the Wyrm to Lumia.”
The girl shook her head. The Wyrm terrorized as his willed!
But who cared to ask for the true ordering of events when they had the answer they sought in hand?
“She should have been executed after you were delivered. You should have grown in the warmth of Fire,” Cecille sighed. “Alas, in the chaos, her pregnancy was a convenient excuse for leniency. No clear voice emerged. Much like you, my dear. Will you grace us with your voice?”
Touching her throat, Valkyrie shook her head. “I can’t!”
“Margaret.”
The constable seized her by the hair and slammed her face-first into the desk.
“I can’t!”
The constable pulled her back and slugged her in the eye, old knuckles cracking against bone.
“I really can’t!”
Margaret seized her arm, yanked it out, and forced her palm flat against Cecille’s desk. Then, elbow forced to lock, Margaret raised her other arm to snap the bone.
“We’ve need of her intact,” Cecille hummed.
“Yes, Your Grace.” Instead, Margaret wrenched the girl’s fingers back.
Tendons groaning, Valkyrie screamed.
Though all that emerged was the hiss of her voiceless breath.
“Hmm.” Cecille tapped her lip. “The first honesty we have seen of our guest. She truly wished to scream, yet she remains silent as a mouse.”
Nodding, Margaret dumped Valkyrie back into the chair.
The girl shivered, touching a finger to her throbbing forehead. It came away slick with the blood already running down her cheek. Her left eye throbbed, threatening to close on her, and her hand ached in time with her heartbeat.
If not dead…maimed…branded…
Clapping her hands together, the Inquisitor resumed her cheerful business. “Most curious. Did you perhaps find a witch in the outer boroughs? I confess with a certain professional pride that very few of that sort remain.”
She reluctantly shook her head.
“No? Did you bargain with the elemental beasts for fel power?”
She shook her head again.
Margaret shoved pen and paper into her quaking hands. “Write.”
Valkyrie stared at the page. What was she to write? She could hardly explain the Mishkan library!
A tiny flame kindled in her breast at that.
I won’t sell Alisandra’s secrets! Not hers! Not Oliver’s! I won’t, goddammit!
What could she offer?
Well, she knew one person who wouldn’t care.
So she wrote: I summoned the ghost of Lady Visage, and she granted me understanding of many things.
Cecille accepted the paper and skimmed the words. “The ghost of Lady Visage?”
Ancient disgust flicked across the Inquisitor’s face.
“Even in death, the Houses find new ways to inspire the rot…”
Margaret cleared her throat. “Begging your pardon, Your Grace, but I hardly find such things credible.”
Cecille dismissed her complaints with a wave. “I have heard testimony of many strange things. Once our guest is firmly settled, she can tell us all about it.”
Firmly settled.
“You will not shock me, dear. Heretical ritual and witch-curse abound. I am well familiar with the true face of our Conclave, both past and present.”
Rotting, sniveling, backstabbing
Sleeping with the chambermaid and consorting with witches in every darkened corner
All while toasting the Fire
All while dragging us into the mire
“A few days here or there, and perhaps Lumia might still stand,” sighed the Inquisitor, staring through Valkyrie and away into the past. “All those secrets, poorly concealed. All the things my superiors would never believe. ‘Problems for the Keeper,’ they would say. ‘Keep your mind on witches,’ they would say.”
“While the entire city danced to Visage’s tune,” Margaret growled.
“Indeed. I thought I was working fast enough. I thought my net would soon snare even the greatest fish: Erudite, then Mishkan, and then Visage…”
And after that… Valkyrie shuddered. Fish the seas dry.
Scrub the world until nothing remained.
Cecille sighed. “Such a quiet guest is a nice change of pace, isn’t it? Really, Valkyrie, I should thank you. We had relegated Sevensborough to its corner, but look at what awaits us beneath the log! Such irregularities even a House might squirm!”
She’ll castigate Erudite. No, she’ll hunt every last House. Until the damned Conclave falls.
The Inquisitor straightened, dusted her hands, and returned to the immediate matter. “Now. Valkyrie. I want you to write me an account of everything you have seen and heard these last weeks. Including your conspiracy with Mayor Oshton and Lady Mishkan. Signed, dated, and on this desk. Do that, dear, and the rest washes away…”
Her implication lingered with a sweet smile.
Left eye blinking slow over a swelling shiner, Valkyrie felt a crushing weight on her ribs. Blood still dribbled down her forehead, her skull ached, and she could barely breathe.
Why not write it?
What power did words have here – in this place where charges were laid and removed at the whim of a church bureaucrat?
Alisandra could handle anything thrown at her. Oliver…well, Oliver might have a harder time, but Alisandra would protect him too.
She could write the account, judiciously edited for the bits even Cecille wouldn’t believe anyways, and be in her own bed tonight.
Let the angels handle it.
Valkyrie stared at the page…
Her ears hot and shoulders prickling, as though more than these two evil women awaited her answer.
If I did it…
Alisandra would forgive her. Would still look at her.
Would see a child and assign no blame.
That’s not…that’s not how…
How I want her to…
“Our patience is not infinite,” the Inquisitor hummed.
“I want her to see me,” Valkyrie whispered.
She knew what to write. She could imagine herself writing it as cool as one of Katherine’s recitations, smirk on her lips.
Truth be told, her hands shook like leaves as she scribbled one word and turned the page.
No.
Cecille shrugged. “As you wish. Margaret, who is scheduled downstairs today?”
“Hill, Your Grace.”
The Inquisitor stood, nodding. “Very well.”
Margaret seized Valkyrie by the arm and hauled the girl upright.
Valkyrie balled her fists, though the room swam a little as her skull throbbed harder.
“Oh, do dry your eyes, child,” Cecille hummed. “No harm will come to the daughter of the Wavespeaker today.”
Fishing in her desk, the Inquisitor pulled out a heavy set of keys for the elevator.
“We are merely going to have a little tour.”