Chapter Forty-Seven The Lady Abandons All Hope
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
The Lady Abandons All Hope
“Why would you not take the Abandon All Hope Diamond?” the Emperor asked his queen.
Lia smiled. All those who beheld her sighed. “Why would I need a necklace? I have you.”
Time of Lies, ANONYMOUS
When the sky changed, Lia’s rebels poured out into the narrow streets of the Cauldron.
Lia was giving another speech to the restless would-be rebels, about how they must wait until the time was right. Emer sat suffering under dozens of interested eyes, strangers waiting for her to exhibit some strange power. She didn’t look up at Lia, and didn’t dare meet Forge’s steady gaze.
She did look up when the sky blazed red, in a pulse like a heartbeat, then turned back to blue. Lia stopped mid-speech, and carefully, quietly, the rebels of the Cauldron filtered out onto the streets, only to lose their heads and join the wild rush of every soul in Themesvar to the city walls.
Cauldron folk did well in the fight to see what was happening. Emer spotted several people she knew at the Night Market around once she, Lia, Forge and the others were atop the walls. And once upon the walls, Emer could see a tower of smoke.
The abyss often smoked and sparked, but this smoke was coming from the other direction, from the heart of Eyam. If Emer squinted through the mist over the Solbury Mountains, she believed she could make out the massive wreck of a building still smoking. She could always see farther than most.
“They say the ducal manor is aflame,” a woman beside Emer announced importantly.
“Is that so,” murmured Lia, gently encouraging, gently curious.
“You know how it is with the Valerius family,” said another woman who sold inferior vegetables at the market. Everyone murmured sorrowful agreement. “Hope Lord Marius hasn’t snapped and murdered his mother and sister.”
“Surely not. He is so honourable. And his eyes are sad.”
“I could fix him,” said the man who sold the best eggs.
A girl half-grown came running through the rubble created by the hasty erecting of barricades. “Amelia of the Golden Brothel is coming back! She’s sent messengers! She was in Ancilley Manor when it burned.”
“A soiled dove was at the manor? Being entertained by the duchess, no doubt. A likely story. Did they have an orgy? Did they invite Lord Marius?” scoffed the inferior-vegetable seller.
Everyone clearly believed Lord Marius would murder his relatives before consorting with women of the night. Having met Lord Marius, Emer was inclined to agree.
“Amelia’s part of a force coming to warn the city. Lord Marius is leading them; they’re calling for people to join them. Promises they’ll be well rewarded.”
The idea of pay caused some interest, but more apprehension. A woman clutched the girl to her apron. “Will there be more fighting? Is it the raiders?”
The girl shook her head against her mother’s apron. “They say it’s the Great God.”
Once, Emer suspected, the hardened people of the Cauldron would have scoffed at this claim. Once she would have scoffed herself. That was before the Emperor rose to sit the throne.
“Is that not… good news?” asked a timid-sounding woman beside Lia. “He is the Great God. Will he not bring back peace, and prosperity, and make the crops grow—”
“Have you ever even seen crops? You’ve never been out of the city a day in your life—”
“Will he not do the things a god is supposed to do? Like a father.”
“I see you never met my father…”
“A good father,” said the timid-voiced woman stubbornly. “The kind everybody wishes they had, the kind everybody should have had. Perhaps the Great God’s coming is for the best. Anyone can see the Emperor is wild as weather.”
“It’s the harlot’s fault, leading him astray—”
“I can fix him,” said the egg-seller.
“What, both the Emperor and Lord Marius? You would be most assuredly and extremely murdered.”
“What a way to go, though.”
A good father. Emer thought of the Square of Sacrifice, of the altar and the blade, of how Key had looked at those blood-drenched frescoes as if seeing them for the first time.
In a tale, the ways of gods were inscrutable.
They could be wise and just and still eat their children.
Bring the tale closer to life and Emer felt differently about it.
“What about this world,” Emer asked the timid woman, “makes you expect a god will be kind?”
With her Valerius eyes, she could see the Waiting Elms woods thinning.
They weren’t burning. They were turning to dust even as she watched, creating a vast, bleak plain.
The Waiting Wastes spread wide, swallowing all before them.
Even the Tears of the Dead River suddenly ran dry, changed from flood to silver thread.
The light of the sun on that stretch of land seemed filtered subtly red, as though you could dilute sunlight with blood.
The stage was set for a battle of the gods.
Abruptly, the city walls rang with chaos and cries.
“The Emperor goes forth! The Emperor says open the gates!”
“Is he going to welcome his father?” asked another voice.
Key would welcome him with a blade, if Emer had ever known him at all. She heard the slow and ponderous sounds of the great gates being swung and scraped open. Shivering even among the crush atop the walls, she watched the Emperor go forth.
Midnight cape flaring, black crown of hair wilder than weather, not faltering a step as he strode across that stretch of blasted earth and through the blood-drenched air. Every bird and insect in the world had gone still.
There was a presence coming to meet Key, stirring the dust that had been a forest, making the thready flow of the river change course.
Emer had seen a figure like this once before – the night the abyss opened and the Emperor rose; glimpsed what she had thought half a shadow and half a dream, a pillar of fire with Lord Marius’s face.
She did not want to see it again. But he was coming.
Emer felt a tug at her sleeve. She resisted, but Lia kept tugging insistently, until Emer reluctantly gave up and came down from the barricades. Lia had gathered her rebels about her.
“The whole city watches as the gods clash,” said Lia.
“Why? Can we do anything to change what will happen? Do you think we will fail to notice when one or the other wins out? Watching the battle is useless. What’s useful is the distraction the battle provides.
I said we needed to wait for a time, did I not? ”
Lia spread her hands, a magician and a lovely assistant both at once, as if she were about to do a trick.
“The time is now. The palace is left unguarded. I say we storm the palace gates and loot the treasury.” She lifted her voice so the rebels closest to her could hear.
“We already have a Valerius of our own. Let’s take enchanted swords, let’s take enchanted gauntlets.
All the strength others have hoarded, let us now take for our own. ”
Lia was right. There were no guards at the palace gates, merely a great locked chain of orichal steel.
Lia nodded to Emer. “Break it.”
“I cannot break apart a steel chain with my bare hands!”
“How can you be sure,” asked Lia, “unless you try?”
Emer thought about killing all the ghouls at the graves, the pleasure and ease of it. She thought of all she had seen beyond the city walls, which she was sure the others hadn’t seen.
She grasped the stout links of the chain between both hands, and pulled with all her might. The chain broke as easily as if it were made of daisies. She stepped back, dazed, and the rebels flooded into the deserted Palace on the Edge.
When the cat’s away, the mice will play, the butcher back in Shroud Valley who taught Emer how to ply a cleaver used to say. But cats come back.
“Spread out and find weapons, find treasure. Quick as you can,” Lia called out, and as the rebels scattered she turned her eyes to Emer. “You and I will go to the Room of Golden Wonder.”
As they made their way to the treasury, Emer saw servants discreetly ducking behind doors, as fearful of marauding Cauldron folk as they were of the gods.
Emer missed her own tidy uniform of blue dress and white apron, the safety of anonymity in it, the promise she would never have to be anyone remarkable.
Strange to be back home, and find that either the place or she had irrevocably changed.
“Will you tell me what you’re planning?” Emer asked as they walked down a passage, her new Cauldron-made boots striking the moody-green malachite floor with an ominous echo that her soft maid’s pattens never had. “Wait, you never do, do you?”
“Do you know what, Emer?” Lia asked crisply. “I’m getting very tired of your attitude towards me. You’re acting like one of the gentlemen at court, who think that if a lady knows anything of bedchamber pleasures her entire moral character is fatally compromised.”
That wasn’t fair. “I am not! It’s not the – the bedchamber pleasures, it’s that you kept secrets from me. You manipulated me.”
“Did I? How horrible!” Lia said. “Remind me, how was it we came together? Were you not sent by your mistress in order to spy on me, betray me, and blacken my name by accusing me of a crime I didn’t commit?”
“You said you forgave me for that.”
“I did and I do, but I cannot help remembering it when you look at me with those coldly judgemental eyes. Back in the Shroud Valley when we were children, I used to admire you so much. You were so strong, nobody would ever bully you. Is it Forge Strike’s influence that has you thinking so meanly of me? ”
“I don’t think meanly of you!”
She thought the world of Lia, but she feared her as well. Saying so would sound absurd. Lia was a tiny, gentle lady, and Emer could pull apart a steel chain with her bare hands.