The Sky-Blue Wolves Page 11

  Vicious piggy little red eyes, Pip thought. Rubies there but the reality is just bloody, I suppose.

  . . . lunging at hunters with broad-bladed spears that had cross guards below the steel as hounds jumped about being understandably hysterical. Pip suddenly realized that the cross guard was entirely practical, with something that strong and that size—five hundred pounds was a small pony—and that determined to take you with them to Hog Heaven, doubtless to be the object of the hunts there.

  Toa’s eyes lit up and his smile smoldered. “If it died trying to gut you, mate, it died happy.”

  Lady Delia’s eyes rolled up. “Don’t encourage her! You’re too old for boar hunting now, darling! Your bruises from this beast are still that disgusting yellow and green color!”

  “I’m too old for duels, and for tournaments, except as a judge,” d’Ath said. “And I’m not allowed to duel as Marshal, anyway. Hunting I can still do; allow me some outdoor pleasures, sweetie.”

  “Fighting with massive murderous pigs in deep cold mud is a pleasure?” Delia asked with a sigh.

  “Sounds bloody awesome,” Toa said around a mouthful of pork. “A lot more fun than fighting with murderous blokes any day of the week.”

  “Yes,” d’Ath said succinctly. “And I don’t do it alone.”

  “There’s hawking,” Delia said. “We can do that together.”

  “And we do, as often as I can tolerate watching a bird have all the fun of killing something edible,” d’Ath said.

  She turned to Toa: “If you’d like, you can have a taste of it in a little while. After all the”—her voice held an exaggerated disgust, and she winked at her partner, who gave her a pout—“parties and ceremonies and the Christmas revels.”

  “Too easy. I’m there!” Toa said with an enormous, alarming grin showing white tombstone teeth.

  “If you weren’t Grand Marshal, some duelist would have killed you long ago, Tiph,” Mathilda said.

  “Dueling is barbaric,” Juniper said. “You should ban it.”

  “Rebellions are even more barbaric,” Mathilda said to her, with the air of someone treading a familiar measure, and turned back to d’Ath:

  “Did Rudi and I save you from murderous relatives out for revenge just so a pig could kill you?”

  “Probably,” d’Ath said tranquilly. “Not that there’s all that much difference between Count Stavarov and a wild boar and his relatives are mostly pigs except the ones who are weasels.”

  Toa laughed appreciatively, even though he had no idea who they were talking about. There were more than enough Stavarov types in Townsville or Darwin to get the joke. Unsure whether she was supposed to be scandalized, Pip simply smirked.

  “Or a tiger will get me, or I’ll break my neck falling off a horse jumping a log. I’m older now than I ever expected to be . . . ever expected since the Change . . . and the children are pretty much grown.”

  “Well, I’d miss you, I assure you!” Lady Delia said tartly.

  Then she looked at the dessert tray, sighed, patted her midriff and shook her head.

  Ignatius cleared his throat; he’d restricted himself to water and soup and bread, and he ignored the plates of little fruit-tarts with dabs of whipped cream, gleaming glazed confections of blueberries, dried candied apple and peach, and toasted hazelnuts and walnuts on clove-and-nutmeg infused yellow custard inside pastry shells. D’Ath loaded a plate with them and began methodically eating them and stirring rich cream and sugar into her Hawaiian coffee.

  Delia looked at her and murmured: “Brute! Skinny brute!”

  “Mud-wrestling with giant pigs works it off,” d’Ath said, and they smiled at each other.

  “Your adventures in the Ceram Sea are intriguing, and disturbing, Prince John,” Ignatius said, ignoring the byplay.

  “They were even more disturbing at the time,” John said fervently.

  Pip nodded as she tried one of the tarts and sipped the Hawaiian coffee, which was excellent—it was sold in Darwin, though the Papuan product was much cheaper—and sampled a small glass of a clear pear brandy whose label showed a volcano and the legend Hood River Ducal Reserve; there was a whole peeled pear in the bottle.

  “More than you think,” Ignatius said. “There is the question of how Alan Thurston—”

  Pip felt herself sit bolt upright, and the others of her party did likewise. They’d met a man . . . or possibly the quasi-material projection of a man—of that name in the domain outside time and space where Deor had led them, into the world of a mad God’s dream.

  “—ended up with a knife emblazoned with the Yellow Seal . . . on Crown Princess Órlaith’s ship off Pearl Harbor. Young Thurston killed himself with it, by the way, rather than injure the Crown Princess . . . which some mental pressure was evidently trying to force him to do. And then the knife . . . went away.”

  “Wait a minute, he was in Hawaiʻi?” John said. “But we saw him in Baru Denpasar!”

  “John,” Deor said. “We saw him, yes, but not in Baru Denpasar. Where we saw him was when our spirits walked—and where yours was taken as captive by the King in Yellow after the battle. Our bodies were there in the Raja’s guesthouse, but the rest of us was . . . elsewhere. And there the essence of Alan Thurston, the real man, was held captive with you. When we freed you, with his aid, we freed him as well.”

  He sighed. “It’s a pity to hear he died—I liked him.”

  “So did I,” John said soberly. “But apparently he died well, fighting for his own soul.”

  “Which is as much as a man can do,” Deor said.

  He signed the Hammer; Pip felt herself crossing herself again, which was a new habit for her when it wasn’t obligatory.

  Ignatius and Mathilda did likewise, and the monk continued: “Yes, I do not think that could be classified as suicide, though I shall pray for him, and it would be a charitable act to have masses said for his soul.”

  He glanced at Mathilda, who nodded and made a gesture to her amanuensis, who made a note on her pad. The monk went on:

  “When your reports all mentioned such a person in this very unpleasant Otherworld from which you rescued the Prince it was . . . alarming.”

  “Saint Michael by my side,” John said, halfway between reverential prayer and reverential curse and a factual description of what had happened there at the end.

  He crossed himself. Pip did the same again, Thora and Deor drew the Hammer, Juniper Mackenzie the pentagram, and Toa muttered something in Maori.

  “Precisely,” the cleric said, with an iron in his tone that reminded you that his was a warrior order. “There was a link there, one that spanned both time and space . . . very large spans of both.”

  Mathilda’s amanuensis leaned forward and murmured in her ear, and handed her a slip of paper. She read it and nodded.

  “I’ve had searchers looking into some things—in the libraries here,” she said. “Alan’s mother took a book from the Silver Tower collection just after the Prophet’s War, when she . . . went to her ranch. Part of a bundle, a gift from my mother the Lady Regent. It was called The King in Yellow.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  PORTLAND PROTECTIVE ASSOCIATION

  (FORMERLY NORTHERN OREGON)

  HIGH KINGDOM OF MONTIVAL

  (FORMERLY WESTERN NORTH AMERICA)

  DECEMBER 20TH

  CHANGE YEAR 46/2044 AD

  Pip started; she and John shared a glance, with each other and with Deor and Thora, and Toa cursed under his breath again.

  Mathilda looked at the note and frowned. “It’s listed in the archive as a book of fanciful tales by a man called Chambers, who wrote a century before the Change,” she said. “There are three other copies. But the head librarian, Lady Bruissende de Chehalis . . . she was a junior there at the time . . . handled the records when the gift bundle was made up and she says . . . and wrote
at the time . . . that it was a play. And bound in strange gray leather, not like a pre-Change book at all or like the written record describing the binding. Her notes list it as having the figure of a masked man in yellow robes on the cover, and no author’s name at all.”

  Silence fell. The four adventurers looked at one another again. John spoke:

  “When we were . . . wherever we were . . . we heard a play of that name mentioned. Reading it always led to madness and death, and the King in Yellow mentioned in it . . . and the Pallid Mask, and Carcosa . . . they were there in Baru Denpasar. In the waking world, not in Shadow.”

  Ignatius kissed his crucifix and murmured a Latin prayer. “I think, Your Majesty, that we should ban this play . . . or the book of tales that can apparently turn into the play that’s mentioned in the tales. . . .”

  “Turn into . . . mentioned in . . . my head hurts,” John said under his breath.

  Pip nodded in sympathy; that was far too self-recursive for comfort and gave a queasy feeling of unreality to everything.

  As if the world is spinning in circles and might disappear up its own arse with a wet plopping sound at any moment.

  Mathilda frowned. “I don’t think we can ban it, under the Great Charter,” she said. “The Cardinal-Archbishop can certainly put it on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum here in the Association territories, and I’ll ask him to—and urge him to—write to the Holy Father in Badia that the Church as a whole do the same, and we’ll forward our reports on the matter to them, and to friendly governments generally. And the head of your Order can do the same in Mount Angel. But the other member-realms of the High Kingdom . . . I certainly can’t do that on my own authority as High Queen under the Great Charter.”

  “Mackenzies don’t hold with banning books of any sort,” Juniper said. “And raising a great stink about it will arouse curiosity, so it will.”

  “Yes, Lady Juniper,” Ignatius said. “That is a real risk. But I think this is more than a book . . . or a play. Or at least it is in the world that the Change has given us.”

  Deor had been lost in thought. “I think. . . . You know of that insect in the southern deserts, the one that digs a pit that is just too steep to climb out of?”

  “Ant-lions,” Pip supplied. “We’ve . . . they’ve got them in Australia too. It’s the larvae that do it. Manky little things, if you imagine yourself the size of the ant that’s scrabbling to get out of the pit and knowing what’s down at the bottom.”

  Deor nodded. “We had them in Mist Hills too; sometimes I lay and watched them on summer afternoons, as a boy. And I think that this book . . . this play . . . this thing, is like that. It is a digging through the wall of the world, or perhaps in the floor of the world would be a better way to put it. It lies in wait for human-kind. . . .”

  “For men’s souls,” Ignatius said.

  Deor made a gesture of assent. “And if one falls into the trap . . . through ill-luck or a . . . an attunement of the self . . . then you become just such a trap for others. So it spreads and grows, in growing circles of madness and chaos, where all things become mingled . . . good and ill, life and death themselves. It is a Power of black evil, but not the same one behind our other foes. We have seen good takes many forms; why not the other?”

  Mathilda frowned. “But the book of tales with the same name?” she said.

  “That was written before the Change, when the walls between the worlds were thicker, stronger, when things were . . . flatter,” Deor said. “It was a reaching-through by the King, but into the most gossamer and elusive of things, a mind. He placed images into an imagination already attuned to the strange. Now, the walls thin, they grow weak, and the . . . the trap . . . becomes more itself. And seeks to warp all around it, to absorb all and become all.”

  John leaned an elbow on the table and put his palm to his forehead. “That makes an unpleasant amount of sense after what we went through.”

  Juniper Mackenzie looked at Deor, her head tilted to one side. “It’s a joy of a teacher’s life when her pupils surpass her,” she said. “I would be wishing that the occasion itself was a happier one.”

  “We have to live in a world where such things are,” Mathilda said.

  With a bitter smile: “I thought that when Rudi first drew the Sword of the Lady, on Nantucket. I didn’t know the half of it then. Now we need miracles.”

  Ignatius smiled at her. “Remember, my daughter, that miracles don’t do the work for us. They open a possibility in the world, no more.”

  Mathilda nodded assent and turned to her son: “Órlaith won a victory in Hawaiʻi . . . you know that?”

  He nodded, and Pip did too; the news had been all over Astoria, just in via a naval courier, an odd-looking vessel of pre-Blackout . . .

  Pre-Change, she reminded herself.

  . . . pre-Change materials unearthly light and strong, a catamaran with sails of a fine hemp weave that mimicked some of the properties of the ancient sails and included a balloon spinnaker that she wouldn’t have believed possible if she hadn’t seen it. She wouldn’t have believed the speed, either, if she hadn’t seen similar vessels working the Gulf north of Darwin, and off Cairns and Townsville. Mostly they were toys for the rich, but they had their uses for commercial or government or military couriers, where the cargo was information and speed was all-important.

  “Good for her, and Montival, and God speed the right,” John added.

  “Amen,” his mother said. “But she says they’re going to need substantial reinforcements to tackle Korea itself. The war’s going to be bigger and cost more and take longer than we thought.”

  Lady d’Ath chuckled like light bones and feathers rustling in a box. “Oh, and that’s such a surprise, since it’s never happened before in all the history of wars. Which is to say, all of history.”

  Delia sighed. “I wish they’d never come up with that stupid Lady Death nickname, darling,” she complained. “Honestly, sometimes I think you’re trying to live up to it. At least you haven’t taken to cradling a Persian cat and giving evil laughs, the way Sandra did when they called her the Spider of the Silver Tower.”

  John put his hands up in that don’t-blame-me gesture he’d used in the elevator again; Pip hadn’t seen it before then, but she realized she’d be seeing it again, as long as her mother-in-law lived.

  “I have to go, Mother,” he said. “I’m a knight, I’m the right age, I’m of House Artos, I can’t not go, the nobility here in our PPA fiefs would never respect me again if I didn’t.”

  “No, you must,” Mathilda said, obviously unwillingly, and obviously too smart and too conscientious to let her emotions matter. “Whatever other weaknesses the Associates have, tolerating shirking in battle isn’t one of them. I think that’s why my father accepted Mike Havel’s challenge to single combat, back when I was a child—because the lion eyes he’d created and trained himself were on him, and he couldn’t do otherwise.”

  Watch out for this one, Pip, the new Princess told herself. Watch yourself around her, always. She’s the most ruthless sort of all—driven by duty.

  “That’s precisely right,” Thora Garwood said. “And the Bear Lord knew it and was counting on it.”

  Then the High Queen smiled, a slightly evil expression. “But you won’t be going anytime soon, John. If it’s going to need more mobilization, which will take some time . . .”

  She glanced at the Grand Marshal.

  “Oh, it will, Mattie. The victory will help keep people enthusiastic . . . but there’s the logistics. We’ve got hulls building on every slipway from Vancouver Island to Newport and new yards just coming up, but that takes time; fitting out and working up and training crew. And it would be better if we waited until after the winter wheat harvest is in, too, and threshed and a lot of it baked into field biscuit; we’re already salting down and smoking and canning a lot of meat and fish and drying vegeta
bles and whatnot, and shipping remounts and equipment and fodder pellets and the like across the ocean. That will give more time for troop-training . . . especially large-scale maneuvers . . . and accumulating weapons and gear, as well. Say . . . September.”

  “Which means there’s no reason Órlaith shouldn’t come back in the interim,” Mathilda said.

  D’Ath’s thin pale brows went up. “Is there a reason she should? Admiral Naysmith and General Thurston are both good, but unity and continuity of command are important. Especially as other heads of state are involved. They need someone they won’t be too insulted to take orders from.”

  “Yes, there is a reason, and it’s political. I intend to abdicate as High Queen in her favor, and we need to hold the ceremony at Lost Lake. Preferably a crowning at Dun na Síochána too.”

  John gave her a stricken look, and there was a rustle as everyone else looked at her too.

  She chuckled: “I said as High Queen, boy. I’m only High Queen by marriage to your father; Órlaith inherits automatically anyway when she turns twenty-six, which isn’t that far off. I’m Lady Protector of the Association by right of birth, so you needn’t look as if I was going to expect you to do that one just yet.”

  “But you’re a fine High Queen, Mattie!” Delia said. “And you were Rudi’s right hand and other half, ever since the war! Well, since the Prophet’s War, I suppose we should say it that way now.”

  “I can help my daughter, too,” Mathilda said. “She’ll be abroad at first anyway. But we need a High Queen who’s not an Associate on the throne now; the Association is just too disliked and feared in many quarters, and that would get in the way of prosecuting the war—someone would be sure to say it was a plot, and people will always believe the worst of those they fear. And a High Queen who’s not a Catholic and who wears a kilt and sounds like a Mackenzie doesn’t hurt either, though it pains me to say it. Unlike the Association, Mackenzies are popular nearly everywhere because they’re not a threat.”

  “Well, I like that!” Juniper said. “And the fact that we don’t go about attacking people has nothing to do with it?”