A drinker of blood.
If the Red Queen was telling the truth—and though Kelsea did not trust the woman, she believed the desperation in the Red Queen’s voice—then Kelsea had loosed a nightmare upon the world. She seemed to feel the slickness of blood on her hands.
“I have done murder before,” she murmured, and strangely, it was not Thorne or the jailor she thought of now, but Mhurn. Killing him had been a mercy . . . or so she had thought at the time. The silence of her cell bore in upon her, and after a moment she got to her knees, clutching the bars.
“You there! The man with the drawings!”
Silence from the next cell.
“How long have you been here?”
More silence. How to make him speak? Kelsea thought for a moment, then ventured, “I have seen your cannons on the battlefield. Extraordinary pieces of equipment.”
“You’ve seen them fired?” he asked.
Kelsea frowned, thought about lying, then replied, “No. They never used them on us.”
The man began to laugh, bitter and hollow. “That’s because they couldn’t. They were never able to make them fire. My design was sound, but the Red Queen’s chemist was supposed to come up with an answer to gunpowder, and it didn’t work.”
Kelsea sat back from the bars. All of the time and energy they had expended on the cannons, on finding a way to disable them; she could have kicked herself.
“You got played,” the man said, then, after a long pause: “Was the Tear army really wiped out?”
“Yes.”
“The general?”
“Bermond was killed,” Kelsea replied. Intellectually, she knew that she should grieve a lifelong soldier, but she could not; Bermond had been reactionary, a thorn in her side. “His second commands what’s left of my army. Not really enough even to make a decent city police force.”
“That’s a misfortune. It takes generations to build a good army from scratch.”
“We have three years.” Perhaps less, her mind remarked. At the thought of the Holy Father commanding an armed legion, she felt something burn inside her. Even if the Holy Father failed, there was Row Finn, Finn and his creatures, coming along right behind.
“Three years, eh?” Her neighbor chuckled. “Good luck.”
“Why are you in here?” Kelsea asked, more to keep the conversation going than anything else. She didn’t want to sit alone in the dark. “You’re a slave, yes?”
“Yes.”
“I was told that the Red Queen treats exceptional slaves like free men. You’re a gifted engineer. Why are you in a dungeon?”
He remained silent for a long moment. Kelsea’s heart sank, and she grasped the bars again, feeling the stone dig into her knees. “Please talk to me. I’ll go mad in the quiet.”
“The plea of a queen is no small thing, I suppose. Even a queen in a dungeon.” A chair scraped on stone as the man got up from his desk, and Kelsea heard the rustling of paper. “It doesn’t matter anyway. They search my cell once a week, just to make sure I’m not building anything too creative. But when they moved me in here, they simply grabbed all of my stacks of drawings and plans. So far this has escaped them, but it’s the real reason I’m here. Have a look.”
A moment later, a crumpled sheet of paper landed in front of Kelsea’s cell. She stretched out to grab it, then opened and smoothed the paper on the stone floor. It had the look of an advertisement, but when Kelsea brought her candle closer, she saw that it was a political flyer, beautifully lettered in both Mort and Tear.
People of Mortmesne!
Do you tire of being slaves? Do you tire of working endless days to satisfy the whim of a corrupt few? Do you tire of watching your sons go to war and come home empty-handed, if they come home at all? Do you wish for something better?
Join our fight.
“You belonged to the rebellion,” Kelsea murmured. It was a clever piece of business, this flyer. Blunt and simple language, but she guessed that its appeal would be very broad.
“I didn’t belong to the rebellion,” her neighbor replied. “I only did this work for them from time to time, making advertisements so that I could earn a few marks for myself.” His voice was laced with self-mockery. “It was a wonderful way to rebel without putting myself in any real danger.”
“Yet here you are,” Kelsea remarked absently, still examining the flyer. The paper was ordinary enough, normal highstock, the same thickness as Arliss had used for her Bill of Regency. But something about the text struck her as odd. Kelsea held the candle as close to the paper as she dared, squinting as she examined individual letters. The two e’s in Mortmesne appeared identical, exactly the same size, with no variation whatsoever. Even the color consistency of the black ink was the same. Kelsea’s eyes jumped from one word to another, vowel to vowel, consonant to consonant, looking for flaws, looking for faults . . .
“Great God,” she breathed.
The flyer had not been lettered by hand, but printed.