Chapter XXVI Progenitrix
XXVI
Progenitrix
Despite being built by the hands of the conqueror—or, more rightly, by his Seraphine masons—Castle Crudele was not fitted to serve all the needs of mainland nobles, much less kings.
That is to say, there were not many appropriate facilities for the purpose Thrasamund sought.
All of Drepane had been, for a century, governed by the laws of the Septinsular Covenant, and the line of Berengar was not exempt.
Not until this moment had any man seriously questioned the supremacy of the Covenant.
Even Adele-Blanche, the great witch woman, the sharp-toothed striga herself, had only dared to prod gingerly at these laws, testing their firmness by conducting her secret rites, playing her traitorous music upon the instrument that was her granddaughter Agnes.
And yet even her best-laid plans and posthumous orders had not been enough to persuade Castle Crudele to give up its secrets.
It had been years now since Agnes herself had given these orders even a passing thought, and no other living creature within the castle had reason to dream of, much less to scheme about, what lay beyond the veil of death.
Life was itself trial enough. The more thoughtful creatures, those with the most reasoned minds, such as Pliny the leech, pondered its many questions and probed its many elements, but strove no further.
Their philosophies skimmed the waters of existence yet never plumbed its sepulchral depths.
Lord Thrasamund was not such a one as to even entertain these abstruse questions about life, and so of course he did not contemplate its inverse, either.
His thoughts lay—as most men’s do—with only what his eyes could see or what his hands could touch.
The matter before him was one of means. How could he arrange the world so it suited his desires?
Though he and his men had taken Castle Crudele, he had no intention of seeking out its mysteries.
It was no more than an object to him. That its foundation had been watered with blood and that its walls had contained every depraved horror had no relevance to his aims. He felt their unnatural coldness, but still—its stones were merely stones. He had no sense of their hideous power.
The Master of Eyes led his men down into the castle dungeons, and they stumbled after him, carrying the body of the lady Agnes among them in their trembling arms. She was still a slight woman, even with the healthy accumulation of weight in recent years, but the absence of a soul seemed to make her physical form more burdensome.
Her corpse dangled limply, just inches above the ground.
In the deepest depths of the dungeon, where the floor is little more than packed dirt and the ceiling sparkles with the dampness of the heaving earth, there is, at the end of a narrow corridor, a door.
The door is made of dense and cumbrous gray stone.
Rather than a knob, as an ordinary door would have, there is only a lock: a bolt of iron that is far too heavy for a single man to lift alone.
It was so cold in this corridor that the breath of Lord Thrasamund and his retainers plumed out in clouds of white. They laid Agnes’s body for a moment in the dirt while they raised the enormous latch. There was the hushing of iron against stone.
The chamber within was as black as the inky innards of a squid.
The Master of Eyes thrust his torch into every corner, briefly scattering the shadows there, and finding only dank and squalid air.
Not even so low a creature as a worm inhabited this place.
The only life was that which Thrasamund and his men had brought with them, their own weakly sputtering spirits, like a lamp burning the last of its vivifying oils, so feeble against death’s colossal darkness.
Some animal part of their minds seemed to recognize this, and all three shivered.
This chamber had once been a vault that had contained the riches of the Crown, gold carried on ships from Seraph to furnish Drepane’s new rulers.
Yet now it lay empty—every coin spent without return.
For seven brief years it had stored the gold of the House of Teeth, siphoned in a slow drip from Castle Peake, but now the spigot had been turned and this watercourse dried to a parched ditch.
Princess Marozia had ceased all deliveries of goods and coin from the House of Teeth to Castle Crudele weeks ago.
Had the prince not been so preoccupied with his mistress, perhaps he would have noticed.
Now Thrasamund’s men carried Agnes’s body to the vault and lay her within.
The blood was drying black on her naked limbs.
This chamber would be her resting place, serving a function that no chamber had served on Drepane for a century.
A tomb, as there were on the mainland, where there was no Covenant, no leeches, no desecrations.
It was not that Thrasamund cared especially about preserving Agnes’s corpse—this was an act of defiance against the Crown and the House of Berengar.
Drepane’s great houses would no longer observe the rites forced upon them by the conqueror’s line.
The Septinsular Covenant would be torn up and burned, itself desecrated.
The time of Seraphine supremacy was ended.
And so her body was not arranged in any particular manner; it was left slumped on the floor, hair tangled to obscure her face, limbs folded at awkward angles that would have, in life, been painful. But—for all death’s horrors—she would never feel pain again.
“Let us go now,” Thrasamund said, beckoning the men with a wave of his torch. “I should not like to miss the slaughter.” The sounds of clashing steel and rending flesh could be heard from upstairs.
The men followed their lord immediately.
They, too, were anxious not to miss the grand massacre above and were equally impatient to leave this place that was so cold and hostile to the living.
They departed the chamber, closing the great stone door behind them and letting the latch fall back into place with grim finality.
And so Agnes lay alone in the dark, left for death to feast upon slowly. Within days her body would begin to soften with rot. Within weeks her flesh would putrefy and ooze like an open wound. Within months only bones would remain.
Or rather, should. Death should have picked over Agnes’s body like a crow upon a carcass. But as it was, death merely flew past, casting her briefly in its black-winged shadow and then vanishing again. Time itself seemed to turn gelid around her.
Agnes was expired, extinct, forever gone, and her soul had departed from her stiffly preserved body. That much, without a doubt, was known.
Yet all was not still within the tomb. In the years that came, some would say that here, finally, was the profit of all Adele-Blanche’s plots and schemes and cruel abuses.
That she had, incidentally, come upon some truth, that her strategy had, by mere chance, hit its mark, but that she herself had perished before she had ever seen the flourishing of her design.
Perhaps her herbs and tonics, the scars she had drawn upon her granddaughter’s body, the human flesh she had forced her to consume—perhaps some latent magic lay in these devices, after all.
Still others would say that it was the appalling legacy of Castle Crudele that had worked its alchemy upon her.
That the cold stones themselves contained vile powers of sorcery and enchantment, the blackest arts, thought to be extinguished long ago beneath the blade of Berengar.
That perhaps the violence of his conquest had not snuffed out these dark magics but rather driven them into hiding; or even, perversely, had strengthened them, but made them lie cleverly in wait.
There were but few who would say that this was the work of love.
That the prince’s passions—some beauteous, and others grotesque—were so powerful that they could trespass death itself.
That the Seraphine were a superior race of men.
Their virtues more consummate, their faculties more potent. Their seed, perhaps, more vital.
All of this might be true, or none of it.
It could as easily be the greatest secret of the world or an outpouring of peasant superstition.
The only inexorable fact was this: that, in the darkness of her makeshift tomb, while her body was held in the otherwise imperturbable rictus of death, something stirred, at last, in the lady Agnes’s once-barren womb.