43
One day after the Ides of Saturnalis
It was nearly noon. The sack was heavy, and Delphine was very proud of herself for lugging it all the way underground without asking anyone for help. Not that the other options were all that tempting. Macready would ask too many questions, and that would mean they were actually having a conversation, and if they were going to have a conversation after all this time, Delphine was firm that she didn’t want it to consist of him telling her how wrong-headed she was.
Then there was Crane, but since their tumble in the Haymarket, he had shown a distressing tendency to want to carry things for her and be extra polite, and while Delphine was usually the sort of person to take advantage of that sort of thing, in this instance it made her feel something not too far off guilt.
So, risking her own fingernails it was. She found the secret tunnel near the river and climbed down into the sunshine and desert of the Killing Ground. She wasn’t used to being there on her own, and for a moment she felt entirely unwelcome.
The ghosts took an interest in her, drifting stickily around her arms and legs. They were drab creatures, and she never looked closely enough at them to see details such as faces and clothes. She had done that once and realised she was looking at a much younger Macready, even down to the hand with all digits intact. It creeped her out so much that she avoided looking at them in any detail after that.
‘Sentinel,’ she reminded them crossly, as if they might have forgotten. ‘I belong here, so shut up.’
She lugged the sack across the sand. It wasn’t only the weight that made it difficult to shift. She could feel the contents of it prickling at her, calling to the blades that she wore again, concealed under a swirling cloak.
She hadn’t worn her brown sentinel’s cloak for some time. No particular reason, except that it felt heavy with obligation, and besides, brown wasn’t her colour. She had pinched a length of blue wool from Velody’s stash and sewn it into a cloak herself, hemming it on the metal sewing machine that she had given Velody years ago when they were apprentices. It was nice to know she still had the skills to sew something larger than a handful of ribbons. Once upon a time, Delphine had been determined to be a dressmaker, before she realised Velody was better at it.
Delphine really hated being second best at anything, and it was well past time she stopped being resentful at being the newest sentinel, the one who knew least about anything, the one they tried to protect. It was her time to shine.
She reached the door of the Smith’s forge and knocked on it. There was silence for a long time, though smoke belched through the crack under the door.
Several more knocks elicited no response. Finally she tried to wrench the door open on her own, but pain shocked through her arm with a flash of light.
‘Ow!’ she screamed indignantly.
No response.
She could so easily walk away at this point, but she had come all this way carrying the stupid sack, and besides, she had questions that required answers. Many answers.
She sat down with her back against the door, opened the sack and started pulling out the gleaming pieces of skysilver. She had spent hours collecting it, digging the stuff out of gutters and broken slate before the dawn healed the city. Some of it was melted into slag, and other pieces were still quite pointy and jagged, like lightning bolts frozen into existence.
When the door finally opened behind her, dampening the fabric of her blue cloak with steam, Delphine was attempting to build a little house out of the broken chunks of skysilver. She was rather proud of it. It had three floors, a roof and a chimney.
‘Coming in?’ said the Smith.
Delphine looked up and up, tilting her head back. All she could see was his massive leather apron. ‘I brought you a present.’
He grunted at her, turned around and went back into the heat of his forge.
Delphine gathered up the pieces quickly, her fingers humming as she put them back into the sack, and went inside before he could change his mind.
‘I want to ask you some questions,’ she told him. ‘Velody says you remember all the way back to the beginning of the Court.’
‘Many ask,’ said the Smith, which didn’t exactly suggest he was going to answer any questions, but nor did it refute the possibility.
Delphine hefted the sack up onto a dirty table and, after a moment’s hesitation, scrambled up there as well, swinging her legs. ‘You told her that the first Power and Majesty was a woman.’
‘I say things,’ the Smith said, after a long silence.
He was working on a sword, bringing the hot metal out of the coals and turning it as he clanged down his hammer. There were few pauses in which Delphine could make herself heard, and often there wasn’t time for him to reply, so she had to wait until the next time the metal was reheating.
‘Do the rest of them know how much you know about the old days?’ she tried, barely getting the whole question out before he started striking the metal again, filling the air with noise.
After the metal was glowing in the brazier again, she thought he wasn’t going to answer as he continued the silence.
‘Few have patience enough to listen to history,’ he said finally, eight words all at once.
Then nothing for at least an hour, no matter how many questions she hurled at him.
Sometime later, the Smith rested the finished sword in a barrel of water and came over to sort through the skysilver she had brought, his expert fingers flicking away the bits of gravel or tile or rust stuck to it.
‘Where does it come from, the skysilver?’ Delphine asked.
It wasn’t a question she had meant to ask, but it suddenly occurred to her that, really, it was something they should all be asking far more often.
The Smith looked at her and smiled. ‘Ah,’ he said.
‘What, did I say something clever?’
Silence.
‘Has no one asked that before?’
‘They have asked.’
‘So what else haven’t they asked? What question has no one ever asked before? What do you know about everything?’
He shook his head at her, and sorted in silence.
Patience did not come naturally to Delphine. Impulse was the sphere she was most comfortable with. But if the rest of the Creature Court, with their short attention spans, had been too impatient to listen to anything useful the Smith had to say about their past … Someone had to listen to him. Someone had to figure out what the seven hells was going on, before Velody got all self-sacrificial again.
Home wasn’t home any more. Velody was gone, and Rhian was crazy, and Macready had moved out. Saints only knew where he was living now — one of those musty little nests or something …
Where did Delphine have to go anyway? Why not stay and be useful? At the very least, she could think up new questions.
It felt like she had been there for hours. She wasn’t hungry or thirsty, despite the steamy heat coming from the forge. The only way to measure time was the beat of the Smith’s hammer, the number of times he turned a sword before he quenched it. Delphine dropped slowly into a trancelike state of beats and strikes. She remembered the clock in her hallway at home in Tierce chiming the hour. When she was little, she used to lean against its side and listen to the scratchy workings inside.
Thoughts of home and her forgotten childhood came to her from time to time, but she usually forced them out of her head, unwilling to let herself grieve for what she had lost. Now, with the heat so thick around her and the sound of the Smith striking a new piece of metal, she let herself wallow in that one single image of home, the home that had been eaten by the sky.
‘Aufleur doesn’t have clocks,’ she said dreamily. ‘Only those wretched dripping things. Why is that?’
‘The Daylight Duc thought they were cursed,’ said the Smith.
So much information all at once was enough to startle Delphine out of her vision. ‘Which Duc?’
‘The first one.’
‘Huh. He was hardly supposed to be mad at all,’ mused Delphine. And then, because she was tired and hot and these things made her flippant, she added, ‘Were the clocks cursed?’
The Smith turned to look at her. ‘Of course.’
‘There aren’t any new sentinels,’ Delphine said, after a while. ‘Who are these swords even for?’
‘The future,’ said the Smith.
‘You’re just assuming we’re all going to get our blades eaten by dust devils on a regular basis? Or are you assuming we’re going to drag a whole lot more sentinels into this wretched life?’
He continued to work, ignoring her.
‘There’s a lot of skysilver here. How many swords will it make?’
‘Enough.’
She reached out, brushed her fingertips over the metal, felt it fizzle under her skin. The Smith took firm hold of her wrist and moved it to one side.
‘You make each new sentinel their own particular sword,’ she said in a low whisper. ‘A new sword and dagger every time. So why are you making swords now?’
‘It is what I do,’ said the Smith, and there were centuries in his eyes.
‘What happens to the spare ones?’
He jerked with his head.
Delphine went to a door she hadn’t seen before and opened it. A sea of swords hung before her, each perfect. One row after another. Steel, skysilver, steel, skysilver.
‘You could make a lot of sentinels with swords like these,’ she said.
‘I imagine so,’ said the Smith.
‘You never mentioned these to anyone before?’
‘No one ever asked.’
Delphine had come here hoping to learn something, anything, about the Creature Court’s past that might give them an edge in the battle against Garnet. This was far more than she had hoped for. Not the past at all, but the future.
‘I’m going to be right back,’ she told the Smith, and darted out into the Killing Ground.
A thought struck her almost as soon as the sunshine did and she ran back into the forge before he could close the door behind her.
‘Since I brought you all that skysilver, do you think you could make something for me? Something important, but a bit different … I don’t know. Can you make things other than swords?’
The Smith looked expressionlessly at her. ‘I can make anything.’
Delphine smiled fiercely. ‘Excellent. Wonderful. I’ll draw you a picture.’
Best sentinel ever. Oh, yes.
The second time she left the forge, Delphine’s cheeks were ruddy and hot, her hair was frizzled and she was bursting with energy. She had a plan, and it was a most excellent plan, and it was going to make Macready sick that he hadn’t thought of it first.
‘Well, look at you,’ said a voice across the desert floor of the Killing Ground.
Delphine whipped her head around and saw Garnet. His animor hit her as an aftershock and she staggered a little under his sheer presence. Power and Majesty and all that, oh yes. Not just an empty title.
‘You shouldn’t be here,’ she gasped. ‘Not unless —’
‘I am accompanied by a sentinel?’ He smiled nastily at her. ‘Hello, sentinel. Though you’re not, are you? You left that behind when you denied me. You walked away from your duties, just like the rest of them.’
‘The Smith recognises what I am,’ Delphine flared. ‘Velody recognises me. I have my blades. Who are you to tell me I am not a sentinel?’
‘I am your Power and Majesty,’ Garnet roared, his voice filling the desert space from end to end.
‘I don’t care what you call yourself,’ Delphine spat at him. ‘You’re not mine.’
Garnet flew at her and she should have gutted him, it would solve so many problems, it wasn’t as if she hadn’t practised on Ashiol enough times, but he moved so fast and then she was on her back. She had a knife deep in his stomach, but he was laughing at her, giggling like a maniac. She had pulled the wrong knife. Left hand instead of right, oh saints, so stupid.
It was probably a good thing Garnet was going to kill her, as it would save Macready to doing it when he found out how idiotic she had been.
‘That tickles,’ Garnet hissed in her ear.
Delphine screamed in his face and brought up her other hand, the one entirely lacking in knives, to claw at his eyes. He lifted her and threw her down on the sand hard, so that her whole body juddered under him. He was going to break her into a million pieces and there was nothing she could do to stop him.
‘I’m going to enjoy this,’ he promised, and then it was his turn to scream as blood fountained over them both.
Delphine choked on it, spat the blood out, and was able to scramble free because Garnet was writhing on the sand, screaming.
She saw Crane standing there, all bloodstained and rumpled. He fell to his knees, dropping his skysilver sword in order to cut his own wrist with his steel knife blade.
‘No!’ she demanded, furious at him. ‘Let the bastard die. He’d kill us all if we gave him half a chance.’
She had given him more than half today.
‘That’s not who I am,’ Crane said, gritting his teeth as Garnet grabbed the sentinel’s wrist and suckled hard. ‘I’m a sentinel. So are you.’
Garnet’s body was still shuddering in shock from the way the sword had sliced him open; his whole side was soaked in dark red.
‘He doesn’t deserve us,’ Delphine said, vibrating with anger as she recovered her blades. She wanted to wipe Garnet’s blood off the front of her dress, but there was no way to do it here. Damn Crane and his heroics. ‘Anyone he kills after today is your fault,’ she huffed.
Crane looked up at her, his eyes very calm. ‘The only kills I take responsibility for are my own.’
He took his brown cloak off and laid it over Garnet. Delphine wanted to smack him.
‘At least come away with me before he gets his strength back and guts you, like he was going to do to me half a minute ago.’
‘You could say thanks for saving you,’ suggested Crane.
‘I would,’ said Delphine. ‘But I think you enjoy playing the hero rather too much. I don’t want to encourage you.’