A beast of nine horns, p.41
A Beast of Nine Horns, page 41
part #3 of Into Vermilion Series
And as they passed from the light to the urban shadows, Coral turned one final time to the Sons. Though Jase had captured their allegiance, they still shouted and sang like a crowd at a concert, begging for an encore. Hell, she kinda felt like she owed herself one. She swallowed her anxiety and drew Crux Caedis, thrust it straight into the air above her. “This is the blade that shall still the breath of the theocracy! Come what may, the old order dies this night!”
As the Sons went wild in celebration and Jase tried to reclaim their attention, Coral turned and slunk into the sinew of darkness leading toward the heart of Saint Isabeau, Tamara at her side.
She resheathed the sword quickly, terrified at the swell of anger and bloodlust licking at her mind even from that brief intersection with it. Her nerves shook. Though she was no longer touching it, she could swear she felt its breath on the back of her neck as they walked. It was in the depths of her mind, whispers forming ancient words of mockery.
Coral grimaced, brought her focus toward the source of that pressure like a shield, like a torch to chase away the night. And like roaches, the malice scattered, disappeared so quickly she wasn’t sure it was even there to begin with.
It’s nearly over, she thought. She only needed to control the sword for a little longer. She’d made it this far, performed miracles without succumbing to its dark whispers. There was only one more battle she needed to fight. After all they’d been through, one battle was nothing.
She’d give Tamara the world she desired. If she just believed in herself, believed in her love for Tamara and Tamara’s love for her, it would all work out. It had to.
Because if it didn’t, it would mean the end of everything.
Chapter 52
The horizon boiled with flashes of lightning. Of course a storm would break, Falk thought bitterly as she gazed out at the dark swatches of city passing beneath their chopper. It had all begun with a storm, after all. Why not bring some bloody symmetry to this entire farce of theirs.
Once, Astrid Falk had been a child, believe it or not. A child who, sown in a bed of malice, had begun to bloom with the same. The memories of high family politics and occultism were hazy from the passage of time, but she remembered vividly that it was 1841 when she first met Noelle.
They were both young, on either side of ten years of age, when her parents and the then Black Viscountess decided something had to be done about the bad blood between the Amaranth and the Hyacinth. And what better way, said they, than an exchange of their vermlings. By allowing the children to learn from one another, they could perhaps find common ground upon which the families could build.
And yes, it had been fucking storming the day Noelle Leroux, daughter of the Black Viscountess, arrived at the Amaranth citadel in Nakskov.
She was ghostly pale, dressed in a high-waisted black silk dress, dark hair done up in a bun, her eyes bright, shining blue in the candlelight. Her Danish was rough as nails, no better than Astrid’s French. But still, there weren’t any other girls her own age in the Amaranth high house. Astrid was eager to make friends, doubly so because that was the entire point of this exchange, and the Amaranth heiress was eager to please.
Before then, Astrid hadn’t really understood the difference between the high families. She knew the Amaranth was superlative to all others, in both nobility and hemomantic strength. She also knew the Hyacinth had been their chief rivals since the Baroness Annelyse de Narbonne compacted with Kakrinolas and inflicted hemomancy upon the earth. And that was more or less the extent of her knowledge, for the hand that rocked her cradle saw no need to expand her world beyond Nakskov.
From the get-go, Astrid and Noelle got along like they’d been raised together. Though they had no common language, their stumbling, halting creole of Danish and French with supplemental snippets of Latin was enough to get them by.
A week or so into Noelle’s stay, Astrid thought to impress her new friend with a trip down to the dungeons beneath the manor, where the Amaranth’s tithers were kept.
The halls were cramped, bare-stone passages barely lit by the candles lining the way. Every few meters, the right-hand wall opened into a small, dim cavity guarded by thick iron bars. Most of them held captives, all foreigners and gutter trash and townsfolk caught out too late after dark. They were chained to the walls, unclothed. Ritual scars hatched the lengths of their arms, and bruises covered their bodies from the beatings that accompanied the tithing.
“Look how they are caged,” Astrid attempted to express in their chimera language. “Not even struggling like animals anymore! Just blood to be harvested.”
But Noelle frowned darkly as she looked upon the pathetic creatures. Skin flayed. Stomachs distended. Eyes vacant, showing souls that knew only the sting of the whip, the ache of starvation. “This is terrible.”
“Yes,” Astrid misunderstood. “Wondrous.”
The girl shook her head, attempting to find the words. “We do not treat our tithers so,” she tried to explain. “The Hyacinth would never stoop to such a level. It is cruelty.”
Confused, Astrid tilted her head, wondering if Noelle saw something different from her slightly lower vantage point. “Yes, that is precisely the point, is it not? We are born to rule over men.”
Her tiny frame shook. “So thought the guillotine’s victims, no?”
Astrid paused, finally understanding that Noelle was not joking. She was angry.
“Look,” Noelle said, thrusting a finger through the bars. “That man is alive! What would you think if you were in his place, caged and beaten and drained of blood?”
Astrid blinked at her, utterly flummoxed. “I would never be in his position. I am Amaranth.”
The girl scowled. “And suppose I threw you in his cage and lashed you with a scourge for the crime of being Amaranth and lesser to the Hyacinth? What then?”
It was hard not to laugh at such an absurd thought. But, seeing her new friend’s unabashed contempt, she forced herself to think it over. The very idea was ridiculous. This was the sort of thing that happened to the lowly dogs and bloodless savages.
But she forced herself to think of it, to imagine it. For maybe the first time, she tried to put herself in another’s place. Empathy was a skill the Amaranth had never taught her, and she struggled with it.
“Our tithers are not subjected to this cruelty,” Noelle said again. “We feed them well. We clothe them. We educate them, build them churches, and treat their maladies.”
“Why?”
“Because then they give their blood willingly. And that blood is more vital. Honey gets more flies to it, than doth vinegar. We must coexist with humans if we wish to survive.”
Unbeknownst to Astrid Falk, that moment would change absolutely everything.
Had she never taken Noelle Leroux down to the Amaranth’s dungeons, never felt her barb of resentment for the Amaranth’s cruelty, then all that followed would never have come to pass. Because if Noelle had never planted that seed of doubt, Astrid would have fully embraced her family’s highblooded cruelty and shut out such concepts as empathy and coexistence.
In such a world, Astrid would never have grown so close to Noelle in the decades that followed. They would never have become blood sisters. And, critically, she would never have learned of Noelle’s mother’s dark designs for the hemoclasm. The two would never have begun their secret scheming of how to oppose the Viscountess.
And then, the chain of misfortunes that led to that fateful night in the study in Niolon would never have occurred.
Astrid wouldn’t have gone to confront the Hyacinth matriarch about the poison, wouldn’t have been attacked by the Viscountess, would never have had to watch as Noelle chose between her mother and her best friend. She’d never have seen the light of innocence scatter from her friend’s bloodstained irises as she plunged Crux Caedis into her mother’s back, extinguishing her life and, by the law of the Hyacinth, taking on the ruinous mantle of Black Viscountess.
Everything had been set in motion by those formative days of budding friendship.
Fitting, then, that things should end as they began, the two of them enwreathed in a storm. They were the red ribbon running from beginning to end. All flowed from their start, and all bled through to their end. Falk had one chance to give the lie to Descoteaux’s so-called fate, or else the ruin they’d fought to forestall would come and all would be burned into vermilion.
The helicopter pitched lower, dodging a shadow that darted past them on the side.
“Shrike,” Naya said.
Falk followed her gaze, catching only the barest crimson glint of bloodcrystal flesh. They were close.
Through the thick roil of clouds, Saint Isabeau appeared below. Most of the city was dark, except for the few blocks surrounding Hecate, which glowed like a starfield amid the black. The city’s power had been cut when the Massachusetts National Guard surrounded the city, but the area around Hecate was on its own private grid with backup generators and juice in excess. The bulging chrysalis of the eponymous skyscraper towered from the glow, gleaming like fire in the ground-based searchlight beams illuminating its rise.
At the top of the tower, a sphere of blood a hundred feet in diameter floated, enormous and weightless. Thin ribbons of synthblood flowing from the ground curled and twined about the building like helices of DNA.
In the dark tarping the city, Falk saw things moving. Shrikes, perhaps two dozen of them, darted here and there, like carrier pigeons delivering news of their arrival. They didn’t seem too interested in attacking, though they certainly had the numbers and opportunity to do so.
Falk ground her teeth, set her gaze back on the Hecate building. Though almost all its internal windows were dark, the first level’s facade glowed brightly. And amid that halo of light, she saw her.
A single black figure, tiny but immediately identifiable for the hole she left in the glare.
“Set us down,” Falk said to the pilot.
“Ma’am.”
“Astrid, are you sure about this?” Naya asked nervously. One of her hands held Nissa’s tight, and the other steadied herself on the handhold above. “This has to be a trap. There’s no other explanation for this.”
“There’s nothing the Hyacinth wants from us they couldn’t have already taken,” Falk replied. She glanced back at the rest of their crew. Naya and Nissa, and the voulge’s daughter and son. They’d agreed to come with her to her ending. Not for her, but for their own reasons. Still, she was thankful to have their company for the coming d’sang.
Doubt continued to swirl through Falk’s stomach. Doubt and worry and a hundred other emotions—all distorted by the two blue-caps she’d pre-emptively taken. The finality hadn’t hit her yet. The brutality hadn’t, either. If she lingered on the situation’s entirety, she wouldn’t be able to keep going.
Because the only way to end this was to kill Noelle.
She swallowed hard as the helicopter lurched to a stop above a central avenue, only two blocks from Hecate. As it hovered there, the five of them deployed, rappelling down the rope and touching down in the dark street.
The spill of light fogging off the Hecate building revealed the state of the city. Crushed windows, overturned cars. Sores of synthblood half-coagulated in the hemming of the street. Asphalt stained red from the overflow of Hecate’s biomedical vats.
With a chill wind rustling from the city’s hidden wounds, and a thin spatter of rain needling her neck, Falk walked on, the four others at her back, toward the light. Toward their story’s end.
As they approached the base of the Hecate building, Descoteaux noted their arrival and descended the decorative steps to the sidewalk proper. “You came,” she said, walking to meet them. Her voice seemed paranormally loud in the stillness. “Though not alone, I see.”
Falk tried to find her voice and was afraid it would fail her at the last. “They’re not here to interfere. Merely moral support. Where’s the rest of the Hyacinth?”
A smile flickered on her lips. “Oh, they are around.”
With Falk’s purposeful inertia and Descoteaux’s glacial pace, the two met at the T intersection one street over from Hecate’s rise, where the dim streetlights cast a sunset over empty storefronts and abandoned cars.
Falk halted there, and the rest stopped behind her. Tension crackled through their constellation. All eyes were on the woman in the black dress with eternal youth and impossible power.
Descoteaux looked them each over, pausing overlong to consider Nissa where she stood between Clive and her mother. When at last her eyes met Falk’s, there was tiredness in them, but also a glimmer of relief. “I’m glad you came.”
Falk said nothing. She’d brought weapons and tools for the job. A pistol at her hip. A bandolier of muter bombs beneath her coat. A case of blue-caps in her pocket. They all seemed too far away now. Far away, and infinitely inadequate. As the distance between them shrank, Falk felt her doubt again quavering to the surface.
“Are you ready?” Descoteaux asked. Her stance shifted subtly, a whisper of wind whipping at the hem of her gown.
Again Falk felt that shiver of ice in her stomach. This was a woman who could kill her without a second thought. But because Noelle spared that second thought for Falk, she had a chance. Yet even with her muter bombs, even with the blue-caps in her blood, even if Falk brought all of her forbidden hemomancy and strength to bear, would it be enough?
As they stood there, stock still, a century of unspoken words between them, Noelle again shifted her stance, a sag in her shoulders. “Before we begin, tell me one thing. Does your army still stand at the ready?”
Falk blinked at her. Though their guns were quiet, the Massachusetts National Guard still surrounded the city. Not that the Hyacinth couldn’t simply leave whenever they wished. “They do,” she answered. “Why?”
A tiny smile tugged at her lips. “No particular reason. Now then,” she said, extending one hand toward Falk, a vibration of hemomancy shuddering off her. “Shall we finish what was started that fateful night?”
Falk let her arms hang at her sides, tension shivering through her. She hated that it had come to this. But if this was the only way to save the world, the only way to truly put an end to the hemoclasm, she would put aside her feelings and let herself be the monster she always had to be.
“Get back,” Falk said to the others behind her. “No matter what happens, do not assist me. This will be decided by the two of us alone.”
They obeyed, retreating past the intersection to a safe distance away.
“The terms of the d’sang?” Falk asked as her mind dipped toward the forbidden reservoir of strength within her highblooded heart.
“We fight to three points,” Descoteaux said, “or to the death. Whichever comes first. If I should take the trick, my victory shall be its own reward. What say you?”
“And if I should take the trick,” Falk continued, “then you will stop the hemoclasm. What say you?”
Descoteaux grinned placidly. “Addendum: I will stop the hemoclasm, if such a thing is even possible.” She began to stalk to the side, steps carefully placed and weighted. “I accept your terms.”
Falk copied her movement, sidling in the other direction, like two sharks circling one another. “Great Kakrinolas,” she said, “look with favor upon these transgressions, and may your will be made manifest in this d’sang.”
“Your children humbly offer of our blood,” Descoteaux finished.
“Amen,” they said in unison, officially beginning the d’sang.
Falk’s hemomancy flexed, a thrill shooting down her arms as she awakened the power of her bloodline, a flavor of hemomancy sourced from forgotten springs. It mixed with her double-shot of anti-muters and grew into something electric, dangerous.
But Descoteaux’s power as the Black Viscountess was more frightful still.
As soon as Descoteaux made a move, she’d lob a muter bomb on the ground and hope it was enough to even the scales. And then—
A cut of static from her radio ripped the air, shattering her concentration. A message? Now? The sound hovered over the intersection, grating and incessant. Falk’s heart skipped a beat.
Abruptly, Descoteaux’s expression changed, eyes widening, tense lips melting to a confused frown as her attention slid from Falk to the east. “What is this?”
Falk’s momentum slipped. Something was wrong. She could feel it in the air, something fundamentally off. She grabbed her radio, toggled it off their private frequency. The silence was momentary. The static returned, its hiss cut through with grating human laughter. “Naya, what’s happening?”
At the corner, Naya was fiddling with her own radio. “I don’t know. It just suddenly started screeching. Every channel is like this.”
Descoteaux’s gaze was pinned to something distant and unseeable. Her expression twisted in anger and disbelief. “I thought your army stood at the ready. Was that a lie, too?”
Confused, Falk held her breath and kept cycling the frequency. They were all compromised by this invading sound. “Somebody’s jamming our signals,” she realized. “But that can only mean…”
All at once, Noelle’s composure crumbled. “Why?!” she shouted, her voice echoing through the empty streets. “Why would she come here?!”
And then Falk understood. There was something beneath the sound, something raw and elemental. It was a tug on the very core of her hemomancy, distant and yet unignorably imminent. She swallowed hard. Though she’d never felt it herself, she’d heard enough testimony to be certain. A Vessel was near. And that could only mean one thing.
The Scourge Maiden cometh.
Falk’s stomach dropped. “Was this part of your plan?” she said as she hurled her crying radio to the ground.
But Noelle wasn’t listening to her. A grimace tightened her jaw. “It seems no matter what I do, it makes little difference. Fate does not like to lose, and so she’s made a joke of this all. That is my curse, isn’t it? The lighter my touch, the deeper the wound.” She blinked rapidly, and Falk saw tears spilling down her cheeks. Then, their d’sang forgotten, she turned away. “So be it! It seems we’ve no choice, then.” Anger flashing through her features, she started back toward the Hecate building. “Wait for me, Astrid. I shall return.”
