Delfine le Fleur sits patiently in the
barber's chair as the fat, mustachioed man shaves the stubble from
her scalp. “Just a moment more, magistra,” says the barber, as
he does every few moments. “Just a moment more and we'll be quite
through.”
The Summer Arcade of the Golden
Cabal's temple in Tsang is a beautiful place to sit. Columns of
transmuted gold line a walkway open to the temple gardens where
alchemists wander alone or in groups along the labyrinthine paths
through twisting hedgerows and sand gardens, through stands of cherry
trees in roseate bloom. Dead allosaurs with golden collars around
their throats patrol the gardens, silent and sleek as death. They
pass like ghosts between the hedges, ignored by all but the Cabal's
newest acolytes who watch them in awe. Delfine watches one such
beast from the corner of her eye, admiring the play of muscles
beneath its leathery skin. The Iron Cabal makes soldiers and
drudges, but her order makes works of art.
“Just a moment more,” the barber
says, wetting his razor in a dish of rosewater. He draws the blade
along Delfine's scalp in a succession of quick, confident motions,
then pats the bare skin with a moistened towel to collect any hairs
left behind. With a flourish he removes the catch-cloth from around
her throat and steps back, smiling. “There we are.”
“Thank you, maestro,” says
Delfine. She stands, an imposing figure in her lavish alchemist's
gowns, and smiles at the barber. “My slave will arrange for your
payment as usual.”
“Magistra.” He wais
deeply.
The
temple pays the barber a healthy retainer, but Delfine likes to
remind him where the real power lies. She departs his little stand
in the shadow of the Summer Arcade and sets off across the garden
toward the low, red-tiled eaves of the Pagoda of Silent
Contemplation, the nine-tiered tower where Delfine and the other
master alchemists of the Cabal keep their workshops and come together
in council. Her postosuchus, Malvolio, detaches himself from the
shadows of the arcade and lopes after her, armored tail swinging. Acolytes and Adepts wai at
Delfine's passing and shrink back from Malvolio's jaws. The beast is
nearly twelve feet long, better than four feet tall at the shoulder,
and he weighs as much as five acolytes. Taming Malvolio was the work
of years, but what assassin could be paid enough to dare his wrath in
killing Delfine?
“This is a good
day, Malvolio,” says the alchemist. She pauses to admire a cherry
tree of particular beauty. Its blossoms drift in the air like snow
touched with the lightest dab of blood. “All of Tsang will know
the Cabal's greatness tonight. The City of Cities will gather us
close to her breast and the Lich King will be forgotten, just another
corpse shut up in a glorious mausoleum.”
Malvolio grunts,
ropes of drool dangling from his parted jaws. A passing lecturer
swallows and quickens his pace, darting glances over his shoulder at
the monstrous reptile.
In the
conclavorium of the Pagoda of Silent Contemplation three of the eight
Golden Councilors, the most senior amongst the Cabal's upper
echelons, are already deep in consultation when Delfine enters. She
watches them from the shadows of the doorway, Malvolio pressing up
against her side like a great scaled hound. Idly, she scratches the
reptile's armored snout as the Councilors, seated on woven mats,
debate amongst themselves.
“It would be too
gaudy,” says Mona le Croyel, the Cabal's withered Grand Archivist.
“Surely we can think of a more tasteful way?”
The
current Flesh Sculptor, a slender, handsome man of thirty or so,
makes a tsk-ing noise.
“We require gaudiness, Magistra. We need to make the whole
Shogunate stand up and take notice. And besides, our new creation
defies the laws of taste.”
“Here, here,”
says Delfine, clapping her hands as she steps into the dim light of
the teak-walled chamber. She descends the five steps to the Council
Floor, Malvolio keeping close beside her. The other Councilors watch
her with varying expressions. Mona le Croyel distrusts her, holds
their old grudge close and dear. The Flesh Sculptor is a grinning
cipher, talented certainly, but whether buffoon or serpent none has
yet determined. The third Councilor, Jean-Marie de Flambeux, High
Justice of the Cabal's internal courts, looks at Delfine with
undisguised contempt, the same expression he levels at anything less
than six hundred years old.
“Grand
Transmuter,” says the ancient Justice, a scowl deepening the myriad
lines that web his sagging features.
“Jean-Marie,”
says Delfine, wai-ing.
She takes a mat opposite the old man, who eyes Malvolio with
distrust as the postosuchus lowers himself to the floor. Delfine
lays her hand on the reptile's armored back. “He's quite tame, you
know.”
“We were
discussing the details of tonight's...display,” says the Flesh
Sculptor. “Mona and Jean-Marie feel that we ought to curb our
approach, rein in the fireworks until the Red Turbans are put down
and Marshal de Grande has returned to the city.”
“They return
within the week,” says Delfine. “I had a nemicopterus this morning from
my man with the legions. Nevertheless, we should press our point
tonight. Besides, the Raptor of Tsang will never be more unpopular
with Senate, King, or Shogun than he is now.”
“But he's just
put down the rebellion, if that's true,” sputtered Jean-Marie.
“Ah,” says the
Flesh Sculptor.
Delfine
raises one penciled eyebrow. “Precisely. His reputation has
become too great. Certain factions will expect an coup, certain
others will demand it, and those against whom it might be carried out
will become more paranoid with each passing day. We must be seen to
distance ourselves from the Marshal, and now is as good a time to
start as any.”
Mona le Croyel
looked scandalized. “The Marshal Louis has been our staunch ally!”
“Delfine is
right,” says the Flesh Sculptor. “He's finished.”
Delfine reaches
into her sleeve, produces a cigarillo on a long ash holder and lights
it. The tip of her left index finger is capped with flint to
transmute oxygen into flame. A little parlor trick. The alchemist
inhales clove-scented smoke. “We go through with tonight's
presentation.”
The other four
Councilors join them before dusk, but there is no debate, no
deliberation. They had worked tirelessly and in secret for better
than a month, and even Jean-Marie, Delfine is convinced, wishes only
to see the fruits of their long labor. He fears it, too, though, as
all old men fear what is new and terrible. It is only the little
children who know that change cannot be stopped. They leave the
Pagoda just after sunset, processing out into the gardens and then to
the Gate of Chains where dead iguanodons barded in the Cabal's black
and gold wait patiently, palanquins slung between them.
The city of Tsang
lies glittering in the shadow of the temple complex's hill. There
the soaring heights of the Palace of Regret where tonight the Cabals,
the Shogun, the Senate and the King will meet tonight, and there the
huge expanse of the Bay of Laughing Swine where a thousand ships bob
at anchor, beyond it the grim shadow of the Iron Citadel where their
sister Cabal holds sway. The city is a salt-smelling oasis, a
paradise of old stone crazed with moss, of alleys reeking of stagnant
water. It is an ancient city, its fanes and whorehouses of an age
with one another, both crumbling and full of lechers. Some say a
million souls dwell here where the air is hot and close, where the
sea threatens always to swamp shops, markets, slave pens, tenements
and villas. Mosquitoes buzz in the gathering gloom and their whine
is nearer than the million-fold lights of Tsang.
Delfine leaves
Malvolio with an uneasy stablehand and takes a palanquin with the
Flesh Sculptor. She ties the silk curtains shut as the great
reptiles lumber into motion, their passengers swaying between them.
Her skin prickles at the Flesh Sculptor's touch, at the warmth of his
lips on her throat and the stiffness of his short, thick cock pressed
against her thigh. She forces him back against the palanquin's
padded boards and lowers herself onto him, takes his member into her
vagina. He shudders, legs jerking, and his hands move beneath her
robes to the small of her back. In silence they make love as the
dead iguanodons bear them with ponderous tread down the long, winding
road to the city of Tsang.
In the streets of
Tsang there are crowds, and Delfine peers out at them in delight
through sweat-damp curtains while the Flesh Sculptor busies himself
between her legs. Shopkeepers, street-sweepers, lamplighters,
fullers, drovers and merchants stand alongside robed civil servants
and the occasional knight in lacquered bamboo armor. City guardsmen
occupy the corners of each street, and here and there Delfine sees
nobles, masked and robed or armored. Dead servants and soldiers are
everywhere. Delfine bites her lip, fighting the urge to scream as
the Flesh Sculptor's tongue touches, licks. “This is all going to
be ours,” she breathes.
The crowds part
for the Golden Cabal's procession. Parents hoist children up on
their shoulders to watch the dead saurians and their palanquins
lumber past in the light of the flickering streetlamps. Soon enough
they reach the outskirts of the palace precincts, the vast marble
plaza that fronts the Palace of Regret. The quetzalcoatli of the
Iron Cabal already roost on their shit-streaked landing towers,
stirrups dangling from their saddle girths. The huge pterosaurs flex
their wings at the approach of the iguanodons, unsettled by the dead
behemoths with their spiked thumbs and pressed-gold eyes. Delfine
deftly rearranges her underclothes, pushing the Flesh Sculptor away.
He wipes his mouth on his sleeve and slips out of the palanquin. She
follows, a picture of magisterial dignity.
The Palace of
Regret looms above them, its stone bulk cold and reverent in the dark
at the heart of Tsang. Paper lanterns drift through the air around
it like a swarm of sleepy fireflies, casting wild shadows over the
plaza and the palace walls. The rest of the Golden Council gathers
around Delfine, though the Flesh Sculptor has already begun to climb
the great stone steps toward the yawning entryway. “Come,” says
Delfine to the others. “We have an impression to make.”
The Golden Council
follows its Flesh Sculptor up the steps, ignoring the hundreds of
dead palace guards that watch them from alcoves carved into the
crumbling facade. A word of discord and the Lich King's bodyguard
will be upon them in their uncounted thousands. At the top of the
steps one of the Sixty-Six, the Lich's personal Cabal, awaits them,
naked but for the pointed black hood that obscures his face and
shoulders. Carious eyes, untempered by slave-making gold, stare out
at them through holes cut in that rough sackcloth. Delfine makes a
shallow wai in passing, though Jean-Marie neglects even this
brittle courtesy.
The entry hall
swallows them in its moldering vastness. It is a living thing, the
moist, dark throat of the Palace of Regret. Delfine counts her steps
as her sandals scuff the mosses and lichens that cling to the cracks
between uneven stones. One hundred. Two. Three, and now she can
glimpse the light at the end of the hall, the Flesh Sculptor
silhouetted against it. She smiles in the lessening gloom, the
whisper and clack of her fellow Councilors building all around her a
second palace made of echoes. Their Cabal is smaller than the Iron
order, but their prestige is greater, their history rich. They are
not sellswords. They are not slavers. They are the disciples of the
Monkey, the Third God, who was born in the heart of the sun and who
one day will return there to die.
This is their
hour.
The
Flesh Sculptor waits for Delfine near the hall's terminus, the very
mouth of the Hall of One Thousand Glorious Senators. He looks back
at her, his long hair brushing the collar of his embroidered gown.
The Hall is an amphitheater, hundreds of tiers of long stone benches
rising in a great half-circle around a deep pool where crocodilians
swim lazily in brackish water. The benches are not empty. The
nobles of Maturin, masked and swathed in their richest finery, sit or
stand in private boxes while the alchemists of the Iron Cabal,
bearded men and ropy, scarred women in robes of undyed cloth, their
silly alchemical bells sewn to their sleeves, are clustered together
on a round platform jutting out above the pit, a platform mirrored by
an empty twin on the pit's far side.
Opposite
the mouth where Delfine stands are the thrones of Shogun and Lich
King, the divided sovereigns of Maturin. The Shogun, Jacqueline le
Guerre, is an enormous woman, a wall of fat and muscle perpetually
straining the joints of her much-scarred armor. Her face is hawkish,
enormous hooked nose and beady eyes. Her big hands grip the arms of
her throne as though trying to strangle the polished oak. By
contrast the Lich King, Real de Thanatos, appears close to a second
death so attenuated has his ancient husk become. He is naked, his
wizened flesh exposed uncharitably for all to see from his wormlike
member to the trembling folds of his throat and his scabrous head with its wisps of yellowing hair.
The
rest of the hall is occupied by the corpses of the Dead Senate, the
three thousand sentient dead who have administrated Maturin since the
birth of its first Lich King after the fall of Thul. Their nude
multitudes only grow, a desiccated quorum of fading minds and
crumbling bodies. Delfine does not sneer, but contempt boils in her
stomach. These dead things have no place among the living. They
belong in chains, tilling fields and toiling in the sewers. Their
formaldehyde reek fills the air.
Iris
de Chymede, Grandmaster of War of the Iron Cabal, has the floor,
though he has ceased his speech and now looks at the Golden
Councilors with dislike printed plainly on his square, sunburned
face. The Hall has fallen silent, has become the mausoleum the
peasants mock it as.
“Proceed,
Grandmaster,” says the Shogun through gritted teeth. “Councilors,
to your post.”
Delfine
wais deeply to the
sovereigns and then sets off down the sweeping obsidian stair toward
the dais reserved for the Golden Council. Arriving late is part of
the plan, another way to build anticipation. Everyone in the Hall,
even as Grandmaster de Chymede resumes his dry speech on treaties
with the Floating Empire, on the movements of dead troops and the new
insults offered by the People's Holy Confederacy in Machen, thinks
now of nothing but the Golden Council. Delfine takes her place at
the platform rail and fixes de Chymede with a humorless stare. He
returns it, losing more and more of his audience as he stammers
through the end of his report.
The
dry, papery voice of Real de Thanatos cuts through de Chymede's
muttered conclusion. “The Apparati will hear now the words of the
Golden Cabal, who have requested one hour of our time.”
de
Chymede's brow furrows as he steps down from his lectern and Delfine
mounts hers. Who, after all, would request longer than a
quarter-hour of the Apparati's time? More than that and boredom is
certain. de Chymede's look of confusion becomes one of smug
confidence, certainty that his rivals are burying themselves beneath
their own legendary arrogance. Delfine ignores him. She directs her
words to the twin thrones, to Shogun and Lich King. “Our armies
have struggled for centuries against the great behemoths of the Machi
hordes. Their sauropods, their tyrannosaurs. Our natural philosophy
has proven itself insufficient to prize back from death the corpses
of the great inland saurians, and we are not a people given to
scratching in the dust with living beasts.”
The
dead senators, those who still deign to listen to words spoken by the
breathing, lean forward on their benches. Yellowing beards sweep the floor as the dead crane their necks with much popping and snapping of joints. They peer down at the bald alchemist before them. de Chymede's
smile widens. He believes his enemy about to confess to some great
failure. Surely even this brute knows the resources consumed by the
Golden Cabal, the loans taken out by its senior magi. He suspects
that they have gutted themselves. Delfine is hard-pressed to hide
her grin as the first tremor rocks the Hall.
Nobles
cease their quiet banter, abandon their flutes of wine and opium tea.
Their masked faces turn in the direction of the hall. Delfine keeps
her expression carefully neutral, though at her back she feels the
concentrated excitement of the other Councilors. The Flesh Sculptor
alone seems immune to the infectious glee, protected by his natural
air of cavalier dismissal. Delfine grips the lectern, fingers
whitening. “We have done what no other alchemists have dared to
try.”
The
Hall shakes again. Dust sifts down from the domed ceiling with its
gilt friezes, its murals of the Three. Delfine turns her back on the
Shogun, on the Lich King, on the Senate, the nobles, and the
sweating, discomfited de Chymede. It is a calculated risk, a breach
of etiquette meant to secure the new order of things. Delfine clasps
her hands behind her back, sharing a private look with her fellow
Councilors. No matter what they think of one another, now is their
moment. Tonight is their night. Again, the Hall trembles.
Delfine
looks back over her shoulder.“If you will deign to follow this
unworthy one?”
There
is an exodus, a crush of potentates shambling, shuffling, hustling
down the long stone throat of the Palace of Regret toward the distant
tympanic rumble of what approaches. Conversation bounces from the
walls, echoing and re-echoing until in blather secrecy re-emerges
from pure nonsense. Delfine's skin is aflame with anticipation. Her
hands tremble. She is the first out through the towering entryway,
first to see the great inanimate diplodocuses making their way up the
Dead Road from the sea. The behemoths, concealed in the harbor for
weeks now, still look fresh. Their slack grey skin is like expensive
leather, their whiplike tails still supple. Each of the three
saurians is over one hundred feet from long, blunt head to lashing
tail. Their slow tread shakes the earth. Their sides heave like
bellows, neat stitching concealing the immense hematological
batteries necessary to preserve their motive force. They tower over
shops and tenements. Their feet crack the cobbles.
The
populace cries out in a mixture of fear and awe. At Delfine's back
the men and women and dead of the Apparati are struck speechless, or
else gibbering to one another like madmen. Delfine turns back to
them, allowing herself at last a thin, knifelike smile. “One hour
for questions.”