Chapter Twenty-Two
Twenty-Two
Even death may be sieged.
—BALTHASAR’S MOTTO
There was another secret gateway, another tear in the world, linking Lionesse to Bastian.
It was beneath a cracked ledger stone laid into the floor of a chapel.
Sunlight cast the symbol of Venus into the nave.
In a stained glass window, a pink-haired angel stretched—futilely, tragically—for the hand of his lover.
Lowering myself through the wide crack in the stone and into a dark crypt, I crept along a passage littered with old rat bones.
The Saturn boundary shimmered halfway through, a thin, undulating vapor.
As I passed through it, the temperature shifted, just as it had on the sea when we entered Lionesse territory.
The air so chill and piercing, I knew it had stirred in the high mountains.
No army could fit through here. An assassin might, though all of these boundaries were carefully spelled.
Most likely, these were only used by ambassadors or messengers who needed to travel quickly.
If there was any intent to cause harm to Balthasar or the emperor, I wouldn’t be able to pass through.
The boundary knew what I sought: to ask questions of ghosts.
I pulled the cloak I’d borrowed from Roland’s wardrobe tighter around myself.
As I walked on and on through the damp, cold tunnel, I thought of all the places I could have told him of Hal.
In the gardens, as he brightened blades of grass until they shone like emeralds again.
In bed, before I drifted off with my head against his chest.
I’d learned my lesson long ago: To want someone did not mean you deserved them.
The mouth of the passage opened. Above, a crack, a shaft of light.
I hoisted myself up through another ledger stone, grasping at the smooth floor for purchase.
On hands and knees, I crawled to an altar.
Jade marbles were collected in a bowl for prayers to Saturn, balanced on each other like apples.
Windows depicted grotesque scenes of plague and suffering.
A Saturn priest and an altar boy watched me from the shadows, faces shrouded. Both carried scythes.
The priest said: “Are you here to see your dead?”
I nodded.
He extended a hand. “Come.”
Balthasar’s granite palace was sharp and angular, cut directly into the cliff face.
Spires pierced the sky; gargoyles clung to the rafters.
The grounds were silent and empty, mist creeping along every pathway, but it was not silver mist like Alvion’s—it was the color of rot.
The gardens were overgrown, the hedges untrimmed and wild, left to invade every pathway.
No one noticed me, not as I was used to.
No stares lingered. I didn’t stand out to the line of petitioners waiting for Balthasar, for they were wrapped in their own suffering.
Some muttered to themselves as they paced, heads in their hands.
Others were quiet, staring into the flickering candelabras as if in a trance.
A few lay slumped and defeated against the wall.
There was a little girl of five or six, clutching a doll made of hay.
She wore a white cap fitted over red curls and held the hand of a man who must have been her father.
The girl turned her head, curious, and clutched her doll tighter when she saw my eyes.
She was the first to comprehend what I was.
With a gasp, she snapped forward again. I must have looked as horrible as I felt.
I eased her fright as best I could, and she loosened her grip on her doll.
“In a few days,” her father whispered to her, “we will reach the head of the line and see Balthasar. He is the only living Saturn magician, the only one who can help us. When he greets us, you must smile, Anne, and hand him our gift. Then we will meet your mother.”
All of them carried some form of payment. Alvionish coins stamped with King Richard’s lean profile. Lionessian pearls. A pile of jewelry or armfuls of candlesticks and silverware and bowls. This man carried a basket of eggs.
The little girl’s face crumpled. She clutched the edge of his jerkin and tugged on it. “I don’t want to meet her.”
Those who’d already spoken with the dead drifted loosely through the hallways, eyes vacant.
Hands grasped for them. Clutched their collars.
What did you see? Was it miraculous? There were corpses, too.
Bodies kicked by the guards when they didn’t move forward in line, examined, and then dragged away, left in piles on the stairs.
On the second night in line, a woman behind me collapsed.
She smelled of the damp mold of the palace, as if she’d grown out of the stone.
“This is my seventh time,” she said when she woke, licking her dry lips.
She told me her husband and baby had died the year before of plague, and so she’d arrived several months ago to see them.
Never left. When she was finished with her visitation, she merely entered the line again, as so many did.
All but me slept against the cold ground, curled in tight little balls.
Servants in jade livery delivered stale bread, offered sips of wine for our thirst. When we needed chamber pots, those too were brought to us.
There was no shame in relieving oneself, no leaving one’s place in line.
It snaked all the way from the palace gardens and up flights of staircases, but I saw no members of Bastian’s court, or any sign of Emperor Rasmus.
Was he still sequestered with his wife’s ghost, as Ambrose had claimed?
Bastian was a newly united amalgamation of duchies, prone to uprising and revolt until a young Rasmus took power. But that was many years ago now.
I wondered if Roland knew where the court lived. If it was in this palace, or another. My thoughts drifted to wherever he was. I will not let you die, even if I have already lost you.
The sun rose again. Later that morning, I reached the door that led to Balthasar’s audience chamber.
The little girl and her father were called inside, and she looked back at me once more.
When I smiled, as softly as I could manage, she flinched.
The line crept forward. A man ahead of me fainted and was dragged away by his feet.
Tucked inside my bodice, Prospero’s star chart prodded me whenever I moved. Four days left.
I rested my head against an unlit brazier, closing my eyes while scant light filtered through the windows.
The doors opened again, and an usher beckoned me forward.
I followed him into Balthasar’s audience chamber.
A boundary trembled in the archway, and I felt it as a heaviness in the air as I stepped through it.
But what could Balthasar need protection from?
The chamber was just as somber and sparse as the rest of the palace. No tapestries or paintings hung on the walls; figures cut roughly into stone were the only decoration. Over the doorway I’d passed through was an infant, and on the other across the way, a man hunched over a cane.
“Time,” came a chilly, soft voice. “You will live a lifetime in this room, Bianca Mortlake. You enter as child. You depart, through the next door, into death.”
Balthasar watched me from the shadows. Pale hands curled over the armrests of his throne, but the rest of him remained in the dark.
My voice cracked from hours of disuse. “Where is the emperor, Your Grace? Or will we speak alone?”
“He resides in an otherrealm I created for him. Rasmus believes I gave him his own personal, enduring heaven. What use does he have for earthly pursuits? He leaves those to me.”
Finally, he shifted into the light. Younger than I expected—perhaps thirty or so—he had that same greenish tint to his dark eyes and hair that the mist outside did.
The color reminded me of a rotting corpse.
Sickness and decay. Still, he was beautiful, the way reptiles were beautiful, with their slick, lithe bodies and cunning gazes.
He was nearly as tall as Roland, and lean as a rapier.
He wore only a black doublet with no velvet, no embellishments, no jewels.
Not even a box coat—fashionable in Alvion to add bulk to a man, favored by King Richard and Roland.
“I saw you coming, Bianca Mortlake,” Balthasar said. His voice rippled through the chamber as he slid delicately from his throne. “I knew you would wish to commune with my dead.”
Whispers swirled around us. Confessions—and pleas.
“Your dead?”
“Yes, my dead.” His voice was so quiet, I had to lean forward to hear him more clearly, as others did for me. “I am the only person in the world who can open the door between their world and ours. Tell me, does the gatekeeper not rule, in such a case?”
“Yet you keep so many waiting.” I gestured to the doors, to the line twisting through his castle.
He hissed, “I give them each as much time as I am able. They are insatiable.” Without taking a single step, he slipped through the air, appearing mere feet before me. “Tell me: Why does Roland Daymour send an—” He paused, unsure what to call me. “—ambassador in his stead?”
“He did not think this trip necessary.”
“Ah, because Roland Daymour has been here before, you know.” He saw this intrigued me and continued. “Not one specter answered his call. For an hour, he stood alone and waited, but no one came. What does that tell us, when even the dead shudder away from our warmth?”
“He’s made enemies.”