Chapter Six The Lady in the Cauldron
CHAPTER SIX
The Lady in the Cauldron
When the peasants rose up against their masters, the Iron Maid, risen to the nobility through ruthless cunning and multiple axe murders, regarded the rebels with a unfavourable eye.
She had never visited the Cauldron, the boiling pot of vice from which the rebels were born.
She would have resented any implication they had something in common.
Yet there was a righteous fury in the face of the woman who led the riot that Emer could remember feeling once. A long time ago.
The Iron Maid had been as cruel, cold and heartless as her own weapon for years. Perhaps, the moment she first killed an innocent, her heart turned to steel.
The woman once known as Emer ni Domitia asked the rebel leader, “And who, may I ask, are you?”
Time of Lies, ANONYMOUS
Emer ni Domitia had been properly brought up in the Shroud Valley, grimly determined – despite vile offers from stable hands who said they didn’t mind her curse mark – to remain an innocent country lass.
Once at court, naturally she kept to the confines of the palace walls and Day Market, as must any decent woman who valued her reputation, and her future employability as a lady’s maid.
She’d never imagined she would find herself in the Cauldron, wretched hive of villainy where the law of the land held no meaning and chaos was the order of the day. Harder still was it to imagine Lady Lia, the Pearl of the World, the loveliest maiden at court, plunged into this den of filth.
Mind you, Emer also hadn’t imagined the dread ravine rising to spill the undead into the streets, or clouds forming the silhouette of a crowned man against the night sky. Perhaps her imagination had failed her. Emer was inclined to believe the world had failed her instead.
She shifted her grip on the shaft of her axe, held in readiness to swing off her shoulder and into a dead neck at any moment.
Emer had cut down three of the living dead since they left the secret tunnel.
Most of the ghouls vomited up by the abyss ignored them, dead faces turned towards the palace, moving as though pulled by invisible strings.
Or, Emer supposed, as if they were maids lining up to fetch their nobles’ bathwater and breakfasts.
Servants moved through routine, obeying not their own will but another’s, all the time.
In their journey through the city’s slums, Emer had observed that for a few ghouls, the string snapped.
There would only be a moment’s warning, when the eerie calm on the dead countenance twisted to snarling hunger.
As soon as the ghouls changed, they lunged.
Emer had to be watchful, to protect herself and Lia.
Lady Lia Felice swore they had reached journey’s end, and were now in a place of safety.
This place of safety was the narrowest street Emer had ever walked upon in her life, with skinny houses leaning against each other like drunks.
They were on the doorstep – in fact, they were merely standing outside a door in the street, as it appeared peasants didn’t even own doorsteps – of one such house, remarkable only for the horseshoe and small throwing-axe hanging outside the door.
Emer tested the axe blade with her thumb: it was purely decorative.
“Forge!” called out Lia. “Forge Strike, let me in! If I was the dark undead calling out the names of my loved ones to trick and consume them, do you really think I’d come here?”
Lia had been hammering on the door, her dainty hands balled up into unladylike fists, for some time. Nobody was coming to answer. Perhaps all those within were dead.
Earlier, Lia said she knew where to go so they could enact the plan to rescue her stepsister. Emer wished aristocrats would cease scheming. Look where schemes had landed her lady.
“It’s no use, Lady Lia. Whoever you call, they are surely dead.”
“She is surely stubborn,” began Lia, then screamed and recoiled as a heavy hand fell on her shoulder.
Cursing herself, Emer grasped Lia’s waist and pulled her in against her own body, holding the lady fast and bringing her axe around in a lethal circle. She’d relaxed her vigilance for only an instant. It would take only an instant for Lia to be bitten and doomed.
Her axe bit into the man’s neck. Blood sprayed in a bright arc against the wall of the narrow little house. Droplets hit Emer’s brow like warm rain.
Dead blood wasn’t warm. Who would have thought he had so much blood in him? The dead didn’t have this much blood, not so vivid a red, not flowing like a river that still had a destination.
She had cut off any possible destination for this man.
Emer stared down into Lia’s face, pretty as a picture in a locket, rosebud mouth a startled O. Lia hadn’t been touched. Emer alone was stained.
“He was alive, my lady,” Emer whispered.
Emer recalled her schooling back in Shroud Valley, where country lads and lasses were taught to speak in a way that wouldn’t offend their betters. It was all in the tenses. He was alive. He had been alive. He wasn’t alive any longer, thanks to her.
Lia’s mouth pressed as flat as a rosebud shut between the pages of a slammed book. “I’m certain he was a raider intent on murder or ravishment. Excellent work, Emer, thank you very much.”
She stepped lightly over the man’s body, raising her fist to rap once more upon the door.
Above the door, shutters dusty with the grime of this street banged open. So much force was used, it set the horseshoe and axe to jangling.
“Lia, will you take a hint!” came a bellow from above. “I’ve enough calamities to be dealing with on this bloody disastrous night, without adding you. Get lost!” She paused, her dark eyes flicking to Emer. “You too, whoever you may be.”
Astonishment at the woman’s sheer rudeness made the ice encasing Emer crack.
“And who, may I ask, are you?” demanded Emer ni Domitia, the perfectly trained maid.
Her tone made the woman blink. “I’m Forge Strike.”
The woman’s scandalously short hair was dyed a ghastly gleaming vermilion.
She had the shoulders of a woodcutter, and was so ill-bred she wasn’t using Lady Lia’s title.
If Emer had never met Key the gutter guard, she would have been stunned past speech.
At some point, however, she’d become familiar with the lamentable accent and deep irreverence.
Clearly, nobody in the Cauldron had been properly brought up.
“You’re bad-mannered. That’s no way to address two women in desperate need of refuge,” Emer snapped. “If you must spurn us from your door to be butchered, use common courtesy.”
Forge Strike, if that was indeed her appalling name, surveyed Emer and the murder scene in the street below with raised eyebrows.
Emer felt the rotten old impulse to cover the wine-dark mark upon her cheek, which signalled her sinful nature.
At this point if Emer was concealing evidence of sin, she’d need to hide the blood, the axe, and the body.
While Emer hung back in the shadows, Lia stepped back from the door and into the light.
Only the broken light of the moon, tinged red by seething clouds, and the faintest grey illumination lent by coming dawn. It was enough. Despite fear and exhaustion, despite going through fire and death, she remained the Pearl of the World.
In the sweetest, most piteous tones, ringing like a beseeching bell, Lady Lia Felice made her appeal.
“My maid and I are damsels in the direst distress. My faithful servant has been forced to slay a man for my sake. I fear she is in a state of shock. And I dare not whisper upon a public street what vile corruption in the palace drove us to these desperate straits.”
Forge sighed. “Spare me.”
Yet Forge was down the stairs quick enough, Emer couldn’t help noticing, for all her protests. Nobody could resist Lia.
A few moments, with safety almost in reach and the streets crawling with raiders and the dead, seemed longer than a few. At last Forge’s door swung open to receive them. Emer waited, hanging grimly onto her axe, until Lia went in first.
Stepping into safety was not the relief Emer expected.
Inside was a series of rooms. One, its heavy door standing open, appeared to be a forge.
Emer was no expert on forges, but this was a forge in a state of complete disarray.
Furniture was knocked over, an anvil tipped on its side, and despite the hour the coals glowed burning hot.
“I should hope it’s obvious why I let you in,” Forge said shortly.
“It does seem obvious you have no maids,” observed Emer.
The woman gave Emer a hard glance, then barked a laugh. She was as dark-complected as the Cobra. In the scanty light Emer could not make out the shape of a smile, or tell if her laugh was mocking or sincere.
Forge informed them, “You’re not the only unwanted guests I received tonight. When the ravine turned inside out, the dead rose from the abyss, and someone I believed dead came knocking on my door. He wasn’t a ghoul. I don’t know what he was, but he had a royal sword to re-forge.”
Emer remembered her lady Rae’s prophecy with dread. “The king? Or the Emperor, as we should call him now?”
Forge smirked. “Why would a king come to my door? I’ve known this man for years; he’s always stealing my best knives. I believe the king has a treasury and sheriffs to steal for him. No, this knife thief grew up in a street not too far from here. We call him the Villain of the Cauldron.”
A wretch from the gutters. The Villain of the Cauldron. Believed dead.
Speaking at the same time, Lia whispered, “My sister’s guard?” and Emer exclaimed, “Key!”
It couldn’t be Key. Emer had been bound and whipped alongside him, at the pleasure of the king. They let her go, but Emer saw them cut Key’s throat. They threw him into the abyss.
This strange woman was suggesting Key had crawled out of the abyss onto a throne.
“Key is the Emperor?” Emer demanded. “He doesn’t even know what knife and fork to use at dinner!”