Chapter Six The Only God of Men Is Coin
CHAPTER SIX
THE ONLY GOD OF MEN IS COIN
When I looked up, the ceiling was rippling. There were sweeping arches, stone buttresses, and when the moonlight dared to show itself, it was only through rose windows and thousands of pieces of stained glass therein.
I lay on my back upon the chancel, staring up at the reaching, rippling ceiling of Aisling Cathedral.
And I was not alone.
A figure paced above me, winking in and out of my periphery. She wore a long, pale dress. Gloves over her hands. A shroud as long as a veil.
The abbess.
“Wrap your fingers around their legs,” she said, her voice, hard and chill, echoing through the cathedral.
“Hold them down. Do not mind the bubbles that flee from their mouths or the water that laps over the lip of the spring. I will press them until they drown. After, bring them out, and always softly, for that is when people will see how you handle them. Lay them gently upon the chancel and let them dream. When they wake, sick and afraid, hold them; pet them if they cry. If they are frightened of the folk in the courtyard or if anyone tries to look beneath their shrouds, be generous with your violence. They must know to fear you, and also rely upon you.”
The abbess’s voice sharpened. “Wear the guise of noble protector, and even as you drown them, they will believe you are keeping them safe. Now, gather the Div—Godsdamnit, are you even listening?”
A second voice came from out in the cathedral. Low, craggy, a little contemptuous. “Not really.” When a creature ambled into view, it was a batlike gargoyle.
When I called out to him, my voice was a creaking hinge. “Bartholomew.”
He made no indication of hearing me. He’d picked several gowan flowers from outside and was attempting to fashion a crown, but his stone fingers were too blunt.
The flowers were in tatters. “Let the others listen to your odes, your time as old a tale,” he murmured, never gifting the abbess his gaze. “I’ve heard it too often.”
The abbess banished him with a cold word, and the others, who must have been gargoyles too by the heavy toll of their footfalls, went with him.
She remained as she was, lingering in my periphery, haloed by the stained-glass windows.
Slowly, she reached up. Caught the hem of her veil.
Pulled it back. Her face, her eyes, were hewn entirely of stone.
She turned it to me.
The abbess bent over my body, getting on her hands and knees. Her nostrils flared and she sucked air into them, her lips parting in a long, desirous groan. Then she shut her eyes, opened her mouth—
And bit me.
Blood pooled over my stomach, and the abbess lapped it up into her mouth with her hard stone tongue. I tried to stop her—tried to writhe and wiggle free—but I was immovable, too heavy to budge.
“Please,” I rasped. “Stop.”
Like Bartholomew, she did not hear. The abbess kept consuming me, rubbing her mouth and nose in the wellspring of my blood.
Her breath came in quick pants; the throes of some sick ecstasy.
Only when she was sated, her stomach bloated, did she raise her head.
Her mouth was wet. There was no thick copper scent upon her, no red.
There was only water, and the sweet, fetid rot I knew so well in Aisling Cathedral.
Light flashed above my eyes. “Pith, she’s flailing again.”
“She’s lost too much blood, sire,” someone croaked. “The wound requires surgery. More ox-eye—quickly!”
My eyes snapped open. Aisling Cathedral and the abbess were gone. I was in the Artful Brigand’s room once more, looking up through my wedding veil, an aged man leaning over me. Benji was there, too, his face stricken.
I was on a cot, and they were trying to wrestle the spear out of me. I screamed. Thrashed. More ox-eye was thrust into my mouth, and I choked, making horrible sounds, every one of my muscles clenching, every limb quaking.
“If I could speak to her…” I heard the king say, his voice uneven.
Given his small, sharp tools, the old man was a surgeon. “Now’s not the time for conversation, sire. Your queen is dying.”
Benji drew in a breath. “Sprites,” he declared. “Sprites did this.” A moment later, he was gone.
Two women assisted the surgeon, and they put a strap of leather between my teeth. “Bite down,” one told me, trying to smile. “It’ll help.”
When they pulled the spear out of me, my teeth punctured the leather. “Ready the linen,” the surgeon said, his tools clinking. “Sop up as much blood as you can.”
“It’s her womb,” the second woman murmured. “A fatal blow.”
“Linen,” the surgeon barked. “Now.”
I bit down and kept my eyes shut. There was another sharp pain—too many hands pressing into me—then the women let out a collective gasp. The surgeon swore and dropped his tools.
“Inhuman,” the first woman whispered.
“How?” the other asked.
I opened my eyes, pain smearing black spots over my vision. “What is it?”
When the surgeon managed to speak, his voice was slow. Awestruck. “Your organs, Diviner. They’re coated in limestone.”
Consciousness came and went. My wound was cauterized, the horrible scents of old blood and burning flesh sitting in my nostrils.
The surgeon and the two women were always there, startling whenever I’d jerk awake, as if they expected me to remain fixed in sleep.
Poultices and bandages were applied, and more ox-eye was administered.
It gave me the strangest dreams. Of Aisling Cathedral. Of the tor.
Sometime later—days, perhaps—someone was poking my arm. “Hey. You awake?”
When I opened my eyes, my veil was off. Candlelight—and a blue gaze behind it—bore down on me. I jolted up. My ankles, my wrists were tethered. Still I managed to knock the iron candlestick from my visitor’s hand.
It hit the king along his shoulder, snuffing its flames on his fine doublet, then clanged unceremoniously to the floor, casting us in darkness.
Benji hissed. “Pith, Sybil—stop trying to maim me.” He put a hand to his hip, sucking air between his teeth. “It’s not a pleasant sensation.”
“You’re drunk.”
He hiccupped. “Not at all.”
“You never call me Sybil.”
“Don’t I? Perhaps I feel I know Six better.
” There were bruises on his face. A party of shallow cuts along his cheek.
Besides that, the king seemed entirely untouched by my second attempt on his life.
“The surgeon has been touting your miraculous recovery all over the castle. Praising the Omens for the stone in your body.” His eyes drifted over my abdomen, hidden beneath a pale flaxen shift.
“You need spring water, I gather. Does it… hurt? Slowly turning into stone?”
“Go to hell, Benji. I’m fine.”
“Yes, of course.” Moonlight caught his silhouette. The king looked around, as if the walls could hear him, then folded his hands in front of him and proceeded to stare at me. Slowly, a grin crept over his mouth.
How I longed to slap it off. “What?”
“Nothing. It’s just…” His grin widened. “Gods, Six. What a performance.”
He began to laugh, waving his arms emphatically and pitching his voice in a low, static rasp.
“‘Take heed: History may be hewn of stone, but the future grows in its cracks. Not all that are lost are gone. A heretic can defend faith. The lowest creature can still reach the highest peak, and even death bears its flowers. A martyr might yet defeat a tyrant, but none shall overthrow a god without becoming one themselves.’”
He put an emphatic hand on his chest. “I said that! Just the other night. Well, I told you you’d conquered coin and knowledge and love and all that bullshit, and that it would make a god of you, remember?
Well, of course you do.” His laughter made him wobble.
“And here I thought you’d be such a beast to deal with.
But with one portent, one rogue spear to the gut—and let me reiterate, a truly outstanding performance—not a single person will be talking about that creaky old cathedral. They’ll be talking about you.”
The king raised an invisible glass to toast me. “Great show. How did you come up with all that tripe?”
“I didn’t come up with it, you witless wonder. I didn’t even say it.”
“Of course you didn’t.” Benji winked. “The Omens did.”
There was an empty cup on a chair near my cot. I threw it, agony ripping through the jagged line of my wound. It hit Benji’s chin, making him howl.
“You’re not listening,” I snapped. “That voice, those words… It wasn’t me.”
Benji went still but for his eyes, which darted over the four corners of my face. “You’re saying someone spoke through you?”
“You don’t believe me?”
“You hate me,” he said plainly. “Wouldn’t be prudent to trust you, would it?”
“Choke on prudence, boy-king. I’m not a liar.”
Benji remained frozen, his breath uneven. Then, like a book slammed shut, he banished his unease and chuckled. “I don’t know what kind of trick you’re trying to play, Six, making me look for gods and signs that aren’t there. Old habits die hard, I suppose. I assure you, it won’t work.”
“The performer, assuming everything is a performance.” My spit was thick. “What about the rest of the ceremony? Why did the sprites—”
“Attack?” The king was wearing a toying smile, like it tickled him, watching me try to keep up. “Another outstanding spectacle, wasn’t it?”
And I remembered. The open page of his grandfather’s notebook. The tree sprite, most often seen in the glens near Coulson Faire, is thought to be the smallest variety of sprite in the land of Traum, with a diet consisting almost entirely of beech leaves.
We were up all night stripping the glen of beech boughs, Regius Ormsby had said.
“It was your doing?” My voice lodged in my throat. “Why?”