At length we were done with the Latin and the lies. Archbishop Larrin closed the huge bible with a thump that echoed around the Black Courtyard, and the finality of it sent a chill through me. Father’s seal hung around the man’s neck, catching the light. A minor cleric handed Larrin a burning brand and he duly tossed it into the kindling heaped at the pyre’s base. The flames took hold, grew, crackled, found their roar and started to devour the logs above them. Thankfully the breeze blew from the south and carried the smoke away from us, drifting in grey clouds across the Marsail keep, over the palace walls, and out across the city.
“Ballessa said an odd thing.” Darin kept his eyes on the flames and I could imagine he hadn’t spoken. “She said she passed by Father’s chambers the afternoon he died and heard him shouting something about the devil . . . and his daughter.”
“Father doesn’t have a daughter,” Martus said, with the kind of firmness that indicated if some bastard child were discovered she should be forgotten again pretty damn quick.
“Daughter?” I watched the flames too. Ballessa wasn’t given to flights of fancy. You would have to look far and wide to find a woman more firmly grounded than the major-domo of Roma Hall. “He was just drunk and shouting nonsense. He was in his cups when I saw him a few days back.” Darin looked at me with a frown. “Father hadn’t drunk for weeks, brother, not since he came back from Roma. The maids told me it was true. You can’t hide anything from the people who clean up after you.”
“I—” I didn’t have anything to say to that. Father had said it for me. He wished that he had done a better job of being a father. Now I wished that I had been a better son.
“Jula was with him at the end,” Darin said.
“He died alone! That’s what I was told!” I looked at my brother but he kept his eyes forward.
“A cardinal shouldn’t die alone with a cook, Jal.” Martus gave a snort. “She was there, even so,” Darin said. “She brought him his broth personally. She’s been his cook longer than any of us have been his sons.”
“And Jula said?”
“That he faded quietly and she thought he’d fallen asleep. Then, seeing how pale and still he was she thought him dead. But he surprised her. At the end he was violent, struggling to rise—mouthing words but making no sound.” Darin looked away from the burning pyre, up, past the smoke, into the blue heavens. “She said he seemed possessed. Like a different person. She said his eyes met hers and in that moment he reached for his seal beside the bed, and on touching it collapsed back to his pillows. Dead.”
Neither Martus nor I had an answer for that. We stood in silence, listening to the crackle of the flames. The breeze rippled through the smoke and for a moment I saw shapes there, one moving into the next, almost a grasping hand, almost a face, almost a skull . . . all of them disturbing.
It took half an hour before the coffin fell in with a dull crash, a scattering of blazing logs and a maelstrom of sparks lofted toward the heavens. The heat reached us even on the upper tiers, red upon our faces. The archbishop signalled and the palace flag was lowered to indicate the start of mourning and that we could leave.
“Well, it’s done.” And Hertet levered himself up then stomped off down to the courtyard. Others took their cue and followed. Some lingered. My cousin Serah turned to offer my brothers and me her condolences for Uncle Reymond, Rotus shook our hands. Micha DeVeer waited for her Darin at the margins of the courtyard in her black dress, a milk-nurse beside her with my niece, pink and pudgy in her mourning cloth. Barras and Lisa said their words, kind ones, but they rolled off me. And finally it was just three brothers, and the possibly empty box on the tier behind us.
“I’m going to get drunk tonight.” Darin stood. “We never saw the best of that man. Maybe our sons will never see the best of us. I’ll say a prayer for him, then drink a drink.”
“I’ll join you.” Martus got to his feet. “I’ll drink to Uncle Hertet taking the forever nap before the Red Queen quits the throne. Christ, I’d see Cousin Serah take the crown before that old bastard.” He slapped his hands to his upper arms. “You’ll join us, Jalan. You’re good at drinking at least.” And with that he set off down the steps.
“Steward.” Darin bowed to the palanquin, put a hand to my shoulder, then followed Martus.
? ? ?
“How stand our defences?” Garyus’s voice emerged from behind the curtains.
“The west wall is crumbling. Sections need to be underpinned. The suburbs need to be burned and razed. Martus’s men are bored and picking fights with the guard. We’re short a hundred crossbows and half our scorpions are in want of maintenance if they’re to fire more than twice before breaking. Grain reserves are a third of what they should be. Apart from that we’re fine. Why?”
“You’ve looked at the figures?”
“Some of them, certainly.”
“Ghoul sightings inside the city walls in the past four days?” He’d picked one I actually noticed when Renprow pushed it across my desk. “Uh, three, then seven, twelve yesterday, another dozen or so came in this morning before I left after lunch.”
“They’re scouting us,” Garyus said.
“What?” I leaned forward and pulled his curtain aside. He looked like a monster in his shadowed den, an unwell monster, pale and beaded with sweat. “They’re scavengers, half-dead corpse-eaters following the riverbanks. There have been dead floating downstream for weeks—some army of Orlanth laying waste in Rhone.” I wondered if Grandmother would be clogging rivers with dead Slovs before the month was out.
“Have you mapped out the captures and the sightings?” Garyus asked.
“Well, no, but there’s no pattern to it. Except more by the river than anywhere else. But they’re everywhere.” I tried to see it in my mind. Something about the picture I came up with worried me.
“All over. Never the same area twice?” Garyus looked grim.
“Well, occasionally. But not often, no. Once the guard see them off they don’t come back. That’s a good thing . . . isn’t it?”
“It’s what scouts do. Checking for weakness, gathering information to plan with.”
“I should go,” I said. “Had reports of corpse attacks in the outer city.” It was the ones within the protection of the city walls that worried me most, but the recent messages spoke of a rash of attacks coming quite suddenly.
I made to turn away but something glinting on the palanquin’s floor caught my eye. “What’s that?” I leaned forward and answered my own question. “Pieces of mirror.”
Garyus inclined his head. “The Lady is trying to open new eyes in Vermillion. She knows my sisters are coming for her—perhaps she’s desperate. I hope so. In any event, I advise against using any mirrors. A handsome fellow like you shouldn’t need to check his reflection—that’s a pastime for us ugly people in case we forget our appearance and get to thinking that the world will look well upon us.”
“I gave up mirrors a while back.” A shudder ran through me: too many glimpses of movement that shouldn’t be there, too many flickers that might have been blue. “Your sisters have left us to find the damn woman but what’s to stop her stepping out of someone’s looking-glass and murdering the lot of us while they’re gone? Not to mention that the ghoulproblem hasn’t gone away. Grandmother said that was a distraction to keep her here. Well she’s gone now . . . but we’re still finding bodies missing—dead ones and live ones. I don’t like it. Any of it.”
Garyus pursed his lips. “I don’t like it either, Marshal, but it’s what we have. I’m sure my twin has left enchantments in place to close this city to the Lady Blue—at least from physical intrusion. She learned that lesson at a very young age. The rest of it is for us to take care of.”
I sighed. I would have rather heard a comforting lie than the frightening truth. “Duty calls.” I glanced down at the Black Courtyard, preparing to go. The yard stood clear now of all but a few mourners, the clerics set to watch the pyre burn down, and of course Garyus’s guard. The air above the embers rippled, reminding me of how Hell rippled when too many died at once and their souls came flooding through. I stared at the hot orange mound and through the heat shimmer I caught sight of a figure approaching. I watched, uncertain of what it was until it rounded the fire and I saw clear.