Lord of the Silent Kingdom (26 page)

Pella showed off how much he had learned since entering Anna’s house. He could read now, slowly. And was all excited about it. For someone of his class literacy was akin to magic.

Anna and Pinkus played chess while Pella stumbled through his reading. Hecht looked over the boy’s shoulder. Vali looked over Pella’s other shoulder. She was all polished and dressed like a doll. Her own doing. She was impatient with Pella’s pace.

Hecht asked, “Can you do better?” And chuckled. Vali was in complete control. You could not trick her into talking. Though she did, occasionally, relay messages through Pella. Hecht now believed she was just a clever chit who had created the perfect legend to weasel herself out of a terrible situation. A stubborn pretense to muteness saved her having to explain.

Ghort moved a piece, said, “Kid already reads twice as better than I do. Maybe he’s gonna jump back in time and be the Pella that wrote that damned play.”

Anna asked, “You sure that’s what you want to do?” But only after Pinkus took his finger off his piece.

Ghort protested, “I don’t see anything.”

Hecht said, “She’s trying to rattle your confidence.”

“I don’t have no confidence to rattle. I seen what she done to you. You ever beat her?”

“No. I can’t even beat Vali.” In fact, Vali was the superior player. She thought far ahead and easily developed long-range strategies. “Pella, I’m impressed. You’re learning faster than I did. Would you put more wood on the fire?”

Pella was cooperative in all things. He knew when he had it good. It had been a hard winter on Brothe’s streets.

Anna did nothing dramatic in response to Ghort’s move.

He sighed, asked, “Anna, our raids got your neighbors pissed off yet?”

Anna replied, “They haven’t tried to burn me out.”

The City Regiment made regular sweeps through the quarter. What was left of the force.

Anna went on, “They like having me here. You looking out for me gets them looked out for, too.”

Pinkus Ghort now referred to his command as the City Platoon, though five hundred men remained on his payroll. Hecht kept cherry-picking the best for his expanding Patriarchal force. He was trying to create a unified command for all the Patriarchal garrisons.

Sublime was amenable — according to Principatè Doneto. Sublime was optimistic now that he had his arrangement with Anne of Menand. He was positioning himself for a future of his own design. He would need an effective, efficient military. He expected to be able to afford the best.

Hecht noted that little of Anne’s money had reached Brothe yet. Delivery arrangements remained confused.

Hecht asked, “Did you come up with anything? Ever?”

“Nothing useful to me. But we’ve got two or three Principatès underfoot all the time. Having more fun than we were.”

Anna said, “I heard you arrested some people.”

“Sure. There’s always bad people dumb enough to tell you their real names. With the Man in Black standing right behind you.”

The Man in Black, the public executioner, was not missing many meals for lack of work. Folks who behaved badly were being hunted vigorously.

Ghort’s men wanted to seem useful.

Ghort moved a piece. Anna wasted no time. “Check.”

Ghort tipped his king. “I know when I’m outclassed. What do you figure is going on, Pipe? Besides me getting my ass whipped again, here.”

“Where? When? Who?”

“All good questions, Pipe. I mean here, in Brothe. Ain’t all these riots something less than spontaneous?”

“You think? My gut says you can thank Ferris Renfrow. But I’m not sure we ought to trust my gut.”

“Uhm. I can think of a couple people who’d get more out of civil unrest here.”

“That Duke out there in the Connec?”

“Absolutely.”

“Not his style. He’ll just wait for Sublime to d
ie.
”

Anna asked, “Is that why they call him the Great Vacillator?”

“It is. I’d look at Immaculate first.”

“No. Not Immaculate,” Ghort said. “But maybe somebody in Viscesment who thinks that’s the way Immaculate would want it if only he had enough goddamn sense. And don’t write off the Connec just because of Duke Tormond. He ain’t hardly in charge out there no more. That Count Raymone in Antieux, the one that squashed Haiden Backe, he’s getting tough with them Society monks Sublime keeps sending.”

Hecht scowled. Pinkus had better intelligence than he did. “I don’t like the sound of that. Sublime might want me to go protect them. And won’t believe me when I tell him I can’t do it.”

Anna asked, “What makes you think the riots are being provoked?”

Ghort said, “They’re always drunk. Somebody keeps filling them up with wine, then giving them reasons to be mad. The wine costs money. The bullshit is cheaper than air.”

“You can’t claim they don’t already have reasons, can you?”

“Sure, I can. They didn’t need to come here without no prospects. Don’t nobody here owe them nothing.”

“You and Piper came here with no more prospects.”

Which was true in Ghort’s case. “We didn’t expect nobody to give us nothing, though.”

Anna rose. “Pella. Vali. Go get dinner started.” She made little use of hired help, now. There were too many secrets around. “You may be rounding up a few bad men, Pinkus, but people are still worried about mystery men and night stalkers who chop out people’s livers.”

“There hasn’t been another killing.”

“Not the point. There will be. And you know it. You’re catching common criminals. The real evil is laughing at you.”

Hecht interjected, “That’s hardly kind. Even Principatè Delari says Pinkus is working miracles with half a kit of flawed tools. A remedy for that might be on the way, Pinkus, but I can’t tell you about it yet. We have to get Sublime’s go-ahead.”

Anna snapped, “And Delari has been doing so good? He may be the great bull ape of the Collegium, but I notice that even him and his cronies have only slowed down whatever it is out there.”

“She’s got that right, Pipe. There ain’t no concrete proof, but I’m pretty sure all we’ve managed is to chase him, or it, farther underground.”

Hecht knew. Delari was unhappy about it, too. In the extreme. And, after a fruitless winter, was beginning to worry. Saying just what Ghort had.

In a city teeming with refugees it was impossible even to guess how many people were disappearing. Or why.

There were people willing to buy bodies, living and freshly dead. And others willing to supply them.

“It’s almost … It’s like there’s another one of those bogon monsters. Here. A clever one. Historically, they haven’t done a good job avoiding people.”

“Not a bogon,” Ghort countered. “Not possible. That would be something the Collegium can handle. It’s what they were created for.”

More or less. Though it was now the senate of the Church, the consistory of its high priests, in pagan times the Collegium had been a parliament of sorcerers created to beat back the Instrumentalities of the Night.

“That was then. They’re mostly hacks today.”

“Then maybe it’s time to call in the Special Office.”

Hecht did not say so, but the Special Office was involved already. He was not supposed to know. But he had recognized several faces amongst recent visitors to the Chiaro Palace. One was the man who had given him the courier wallet to take to Sonsa.

Muniero Delari was not happy. He loathed the Special Office. He hated Witchfinders. He had little love for the Brotherhood as a whole. He blamed them for the death of his only son.

“We don’t want to have to deal with that. They’re too powerful already.”

“And getting more powerful fast,” Anna said. “Rumor says the top Witchfinders have come over from the Castella Anjela dolla Picolena. They want to take control of the Society for the Suppression of Heresy and Sacrilege.”

Hecht said, “It does look that way. And it’s making a lot ot people unhappy.”

Everyone in the Church, excepting the Brotherhood of War, were certain that the Brotherhood enjoyed too much power and influence already. The Brotherhood believed it ought to rule a Church Militant. A Church far more aggressive toward Unbelievers and the Instrumentalities of the Night. Honario Benedocto’s commitment was too feeble for them.

Pella announced, “There’s food, people.”

“I swear,” Anna grumbled, “I can’t teach him manners at knife point.”

“He does fine in public,” Ghort said.

“Kind of like you,” said Hecht.

“A lot like me. I’m slick as a weasel when I got an audience. The lad must be my spiritual offspring.”

Anna said, “He doesn’t tell as many tall tales.”

“Give him time. He’s only a kid. So what’s on the table, Pella?”

“Lamb p
ie.
Piper always wants mutton something whenever he’s here. Like he was a Deve, or something.”

“I just like mutton. And you don’t get it around here much.” He started to pull a seat away from Anna’s low dining table.

The world began to shake.

“What the hell?”

“Earthquake!” Anna squealed.

Pella’s jaw dropped. Nothing came out of his mouth. Vali shrieked, the first sound Hecht ever heard from her. She flung herself at Anna, buried herself in the woman’s skirts. Terrified.

“I don’t think it’s a quake,” Ghort gasped. “It’s going on way too long.” The earth did go on shaking. A deep-throated, distant, ongoing roar, punctuated by screams, came from outside.

“I don’t think so, either,” Hecht said. He was aware of no historical instance of an earthquake in Brothe.

He headed for the front door.

Anna barked, “You don’t want to go out there!”

The racket outside suggested rising panic.

Something fell in the kitchen.

“I want to see …”

“Every one of those idiots will expect you to know what’s happening. And what to do about it.”

The woman might have a point. She knew her neighbors. “You check it out, then. I’ll see what happened in the kitchen.”

Anna went outside. The kids followed her, too quick and elusive to be stayed.

Ghort said, “We’re gonna got to go out there anyhow, Pipe. ‘Cause whatever that is, it’s big and it’s our job to get in the middle of it.”

Pinkus Ghort was not psychic. Anyone able to walk and talk at the same time could have made that call.

They had made themselves critical cogs in the Brothen machine.

They got away without attracting attention. People were all focused on a vast, thick, dense boiling cloud rising to the north-northwest.

“What the hell?” Ghort muttered, awed.

“That doesn’t look like smoke.” But Hecht could not imagine how so much dust could be thrown up.

The ground still trembled occasionally, but no longer continuously.

Lightning crackled inside the roiling gray cloud.

“Sorcery,” Ghort murmured. “I’ve never seen lightning with that greenish tint.”

“I’m getting a bad feeling, Pinkus.”

The lightning flashed more emphatically. The cloud lit up from inside, a flickering lilac glow that waxed and waned like a slow heartbeat. Thunder burped.

“That’s got to be up by the hippodrome, Pipe. Maybe the part they’re working on fell down.”

The racing stadium was fourteen hundred years old. In ancient times it had been the scene of gladiatorial contests and other blood games. Renovations had been under way since the close of the autumn racing season because a small collapse had taken place during the pounding excitement of a late-season chariot race featuring champions from Firaldian cities against several from the Eastern Empire.

“It’d have to be a big part.”

They were afoot, pushing upstream against a current of fugitives whose panicky reports made no sense.

The lightning in the cloud grew more excited. The cloud itself was ferociously active but contained. It was not spreading. It did rise higher with every flash. The waxing/waning light sent glowing globs climbing the vast trunk, fading as they slowed.

“It’s definitely dust,” Hecht said. “I can smell it already.”

“Maybe we better not get any closer, then. That much stuff could drown you without water.”

Particularly vicious lightning ripped through the cloud. And sustained itself.

The cloud burst.

“Shit! Look at that!”

The cloud collapsed. Moments later a churning flood swept around a turn a quarter mile ahead. It charged them faster than a man could run. Ghort swore. “Aaron’s Hairy Balls!”

Hecht hoisted his shirt over his face, almost panicky.

Ghort pulled him into a tenement doorway a moment before the flood arrived. Ghort pounded on the door. “City Regiment! Emergency! Open up!”

To Hecht’s amazement, that worked. A stooped crone stared at them from behind a preteen boy armed with a broken board. Her cataracted eyes were open amazingly wide.

“We ain’t spooks, Granny. Get your ass in there, Pipe! You want to drown in this shit?”

Ghort slammed the door. Dust swirled in through cracks. Ghort brushed himself off enough to reveal his City Regiment officer’s jacket. Which he wore mostly because of the perks it could command.

The boy recognized him. “It’s the Commandant his own self, Nana. Really.”

The old woman remained suspicious. Which seemed a sound strategy to Hecht.

Ghort told her, “Don’t open up again before the dust settles. It’ll choke you right now. Boy, is there any way to reach the roof from inside?” The tenement stood four stories tall.

The boy said, “Follow me, Commandant.”

Hecht raised an eyebrow. Ghort had the title but nobody used it. Strange as it might sound, this looked like a case of hero worship.

Disturbing thought.

The roof did raise them above the worst of the dust. But did them no good when it came to betraying the source of the dust.

The boy chattered away. He had followed Ghort’s career. He wanted to be a regular city soldier when he grew up.

Hecht shook his head and tried to discover the source of the dust. He could see nothing but a sinking, flattening dome of gray that hid the city immediately north. The high points of Krois, the Castella, the Chiaro Palace, various obelisks in the Memorium, distant hills, and so forth could just be distinguished beyond.