Power & Majesty (26 page)

‘Hard to say. The air still feels…I don’t know. I’m not used to having such strong Court senses.’

In the Balisquine gardens, the Pigeon Lord carried several of the gulls, allowing them to perch on his bulky shoulders and hands. His other two courtesi took the remaining gulls onto their own bodies. They walked in solemn procession down into the city streets and Velody lost sight of them.

‘What happens now?’ she asked.

‘Might be the danger is just beginning.’

Before she could ask Crane what he meant by that, Velody saw Ashiol. Still in his black chimaera form, he flew a slow, leisurely lap around the northern heights of the city, then another. When his circles brought him for a third time over the Gardens of Trajus Alysaundre, he descended to the grass and reverted to his human form, waiting.

The Panther, Ferax and Wolf Lords all gathered their courtesi and flew to him, each landing a respectful distance away and also reverting to human form. After several more minutes, Poet, the Rat Lord, joined them, putting more distance than most between himself and Ashiol. He did not lose his Lord form, continuing to glow fiercely white.

A longer while passed, and the Pigeon Lord arrived on the wing, surrounded by his flying retinue. This time, his gull courtesa managed to pull herself back into human form and stay there. Pale and shaking, she was supported by the other two women who had been sparrows and plovers.

Velody couldn’t help wondering, if that tipsy mob of revellers were to stagger through the Gardens of Trajus Alysaundre now, would they notice that it was full of naked people?

The Creature Court stood among the rubble of the statues that had been destroyed by scratchlight. As Velody watched, the fallen shards of marble shifted and moved as if they were autumn leaves twisting in the breeze. She was amazed to see the statues slowly reconstituting themselves, the broken pieces and marble dust floating back together as if reversing the damage that the sky had hurled down on them.

‘Is Ash doing that?’ she asked.

‘No,’ said Crane, a note of pride in his voice. ‘Aufleur does it all by herself. Look.’

He gestured to the nearby house that had been obliterated by a blast from the sky. The roof tiles were coming together, crumbs and broken pieces snapping back until they were as good as new, then flying up to take their proper place. The whole house was healing, bricks and mortar crunching back into position. It happened all over the city. Even the gutters of the porch they stood under were unmelting, straightening, the marks of slow rain being erased from them.

‘As if it never happened,’ Velody said. ‘Was it all some kind of hallucination?’

‘Oh, it was real enough,’ said Crane. ‘Damson will take a long time to recover from losing one of her gulls. If any of them had lost their battle, they would have been killed for good.’

‘But none of the damage is permanent,’ said Velody, trying to understand.

Crane hunched up against the wall of the church. ‘Ever heard of a city called Tierce?’

Velody felt as if she had been stabbed.
Tierce
. All afternoon and evening, working with Delphine and Rhian, she had fought the urge to test their memories, to see if it was really true that they did not remember a single detail about their friends and families and the city all three of them had grown up in. She knew it was true though. Until today, she had not remembered Tierce herself.

‘Tell me about it,’ she said softly.

‘It was our nearest neighbour—the capital of the duchy Reyenna.’

Velody frowned. ‘Isn’t Reyenna one of the northern baronies? It shouldn’t even have a city.’

It was as if she had two sets of memories overlapping each other—the Velody who remembered nothing before she came to Aufleur, and the Velody who had written to her family every week, and loved Rhian’s brother Cyniver. A rush of memories came back to her—his hands, the smell of his hair…

‘You’re going to have to trust me on this,’ said Crane. ‘Ammoria had three duchies once, each with a capital city. Bazeppe of Silano, Aufleur of Lattorio and Tierce of Reyenna. But the Creature Court of Tierce lost their fight. The last of them died, and there was no one to battle against the sky.’

‘I’ve never heard of Tierce before today,’ said Velody, choosing her words carefully. ‘How long ago was this?’

‘Five years ago,’ said Crane. ‘It was only two hours from Aufleur by rail, Velody. And no one of the daylight remembers that it ever existed. It wasn’t just wiped from the land, it was wiped from history.’ He laughed bitterly. ‘I was nine years old when I was sent to the workhouse here in Aufleur. I was lucky—our village was halfway between here and Reyenna. It could just as easily have been Tierce that I was sent to. That’s where my brothers went. If it wasn’t for the Court, I wouldn’t remember them
at all. My mother died last year thinking I had always been her only son.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Velody, knowing that it was inadequate. Her mind was racing. Five years ago, she and Delphine and Rhian had completed their apprenticeships,
and Delphine was given a house, but couldn’t remember the aunt who had given it to her
.

Crane shrugged, as if it were an old wound that didn’t hurt much any more. ‘There are people walking around Aufleur who were born in Tierce and they don’t remember anything about it. They just have blanks where their history should be. That’s why the Creature Court fights the sky. That’s why I serve them. It could happen to Aufleur if they fail.’

‘They don’t strike me as the heroic types,’ said Velody.

Down in the Gardens of Trajus, the Court began some kind of ritual. Ashiol approached each of the Lords and courtesi in turn, touching his lips to their foreheads. Macready and Kelpie stood behind him, the only ones who were clothed.

‘Oh, it’s self-interest all the way,’ said Crane. ‘They like this city. It’s theirs. Their powers are all tangled up in having a city to defend. There’s no point to them without their mission.’

‘Can we get closer?’ Velody asked, to stop herself telling him,
I was born in Tierce. Garnet stole that memory from me along with everything else.
‘I want to hear what he’s saying.’

A
fter battle, it was the task of the Power and Majesty to examine each member of the Creature Court for damage and bestow his kiss of approval. Ashiol had never done it before, but he managed the ceremony smoothly enough. When Mars, Livilla, Priest, Dhynar and all of their courtesi had been cleansed, Ashiol finally turned to Poet. Poet still wore his Lord form, flouting convention. He had always been expert at casual insolence.

‘And you, Poet,’ said Ashiol. ‘Where were your courtesi in this skybattle?’

‘Sorry about that, kitten,’ said Poet. ‘I’m a little wary of letting my boys near you since you bit one of their throats out. You understand.’

‘Are you saying that you deliberately withheld them from battle?’

Poet smiled.

‘It’s a question of loyalty,’ said Ashiol. ‘Where is your loyalty, Lord of Rats?’

‘My loyalty is with the Power and Majesty, always, unquestioning,’ said Poet, his voice rising. ‘Who are you to ask me that? You have taken no oaths, and neither have we.
Are we expected to follow you into battle without the blindest knowledge of what you are to us? Where is
your
loyalty, Creature King?’

Ashiol stared at the younger man, genuinely surprised at his heat. When had Poet started caring? He had always been the one most likely to mock their higher purpose, puncturing the ego of anyone who took the world too seriously.

Poet’s voice was ragged as he addressed the whole Court. ‘He didn’t come back to lead us into battle! He just happened to be here. Every spare moment since Garnet died, this so-called Creature King of ours has been hunting the streets for someone else to rule in his place, a demoiselle with less sky experience than the youngest of our courtesi!’

This was evidently no surprise to Dhynar, Priest or Mars, but no one had passed the intelligence on to Livilla. ‘A
demoiselle
?’ she repeated.

‘A female King,’ agreed Poet. ‘And did our Ash bring this miracle, this marvel, to us to decide what to do with her? No, he hid her away so that he could train her in secret to be the Power and Majesty he knows he can never be!’

‘You go too far, Poet,’ said Ashiol. His control of the situation was slipping. Could he get through this without tearing Poet’s throat out?

‘And what are you going to do to me,
Majesty
?’

It was a challenge that had to be answered.

Ashiol rolled his power over the Creature Lord, crushing Poet’s animor with the immense weight of his own. Poet fell to his knees with the pressure, eyes and mouth wide. A blood vessel burst in the white of his left eye, and he made a noise that was half-gasp and half-laugh. ‘Oh, that felt good, sweetling. Do it again.’

With a growl, Ashiol seized Poet by the throat and lifted him high into the air. Poet was shorter, and he dangled from the Creature King’s hand like a broken puppet.

‘I didn’t want you to be the one that I made an example
of,’ said Ashiol, gritting his teeth. ‘But I am here to stay, Poet. My moment of weakness is over. I will be the Power and Majesty, and you will regret challenging me.’

It was better, at least, than the ‘this will hurt me more than it hurts you’ line that he had once heard Garnet deliver with only a faint trace of irony.

Something crossed Poet’s face, an expression that Ashiol didn’t have time to decipher because he was busy forming his free hand into a long black claw that gleamed with the dark light of the chimaera.

‘That’s more like it,’ Poet managed to rasp. ‘Scare the shit out of them, kitten.’

Ashiol drove the claw into Poet’s stomach and twisted hard. Poet screamed, his body twitching wildly.

It was hard, to keep the claw inside and twisting, to deliver heat and pain into a horribly responsive body. It was the hardest thing Ashiol had ever done in his life. Sweat dripped into his eyes and, when he looked again, it was not the Poet of now that he saw but the defensive, wide-eyed child who had first been brought into Tasha’s household. The noise coming from the boy now was not even a scream, but the moan of an animal in pain.

‘Stop it!’

For a moment, Ashiol thought he was hallucinating. What was Velody doing here? It couldn’t actually
be
her standing in the midst of the Creature Court.

She wasn’t in Lord form. She was just herself, in a shapeless black gown and sandals, dark hair tangled around her face, large grey eyes wide and streaked with tears.

‘Stop it, Ash,’ she said again, so forcefully that he felt her animor uncurl within her body.

The other Lords felt it too. They stared at her as she approached.

Ashiol let go of Poet’s throat and lowered his claw, letting the Creature Lord’s body slide wetly to the grass with a thump. There was blood everywhere. Without
Poet’s courtesi to assist him, he might die of this.
Am I monster enough to let him? If not, why the frig not?

‘This is the way we do things,’ he said aloud to Velody. ‘This is what the Creature Court is.’

‘Who is this demme, Ash?’ asked Livilla, piercing as ever. ‘What right does she have to speak to you like this?’

‘If you had been listening, my dear,’ said Priest, ‘you would know exactly who she is.’

Velody had eyes and ears only for Ashiol. ‘
Why
is this the way you do things?’ she asked, her face raw and filled with horror. ‘How do you even know this is the right way? Have you ever tried anything else?’

‘Think you could do it better?’ Ashiol challenged, seeing his chance.

That stopped her. ‘No.’

He flung out an arm and threw a thread of animor at the nearest courtesa, who happened to be Priest’s gull. The energy struck the demme on the left side and she screamed as it exploded in her face, throwing her to the ground. The smell of charred flesh filled the air. Priest and his other courtesi went to her side, holding her close and keeping her alive.
Where the hells are Poet’s courtesi? Will they let him bleed to death? No one else here can raise a hand to help him without looking weak.

‘Now do you think you can do it better?’ Ashiol asked in a steady voice.

‘That’s what you want me to say,’ said Velody. ‘I won’t let you bully me into this.’

‘Why not? Bullying is what we do.’ Ashiol smiled, a genuine smile. He had been wrong from the start. She wasn’t the one to take Garnet’s place as Power and Majesty. How could she? ‘You were right, Velody. You just don’t have the stomach for this.’

Her grey eyes blazed, and she moved her hand as if to slap him.

Ashiol didn’t see it coming. There was a fierce burst of light and then he was on his back, coughing. The scent of
her animor overwhelmed him as he struggled to recover from the blast, and he tried not to think about how long it had taken him to master the trick that she had copied from him in a matter of seconds.

A new weight pressed on his chest as Velody set a sandalled foot over his ribcage. ‘Ashiol Xandelian,’ she said in a cold voice, ‘you don’t know me at all.’

And he saw it, in that moment. Overlying her sweet, angry face, he saw the truth of it. He wasn’t the one that the Creature Court needed to be afraid of. Velody could be the monster after all.
She might be frigging good at it.

It was easy. Velody was horrified at seeing Ashiol dispense pain so casually upon another person, and yet a cold part of her brain had noted exactly how he drew the animor from within himself—only a little, not enough that he would miss it—and formed it into a destructive missile. It was a manoeuvre, that was all, something as simple as casting on a stitch or fitting a patchwork piece into place. Having seen him put it into practice, it was easy to turn his move against him and strike him down with this dark, sizzling power that she was only just beginning to recognise inside herself.

Then he was on the ground, and Velody was standing over him. She was in Lord form, glowing with the strength of her own inner power. ‘Ashiol Xandelian, you don’t know me at all.’

‘None of us know you,’ broke in a refined voice—the Pigeon Lord, she thought. ‘Just who are you, demoiselle?’

She turned and looked at them. Poet was crumpled on the grass, coughing blood from his mouth even as more bubbled up from the gaping wound in his stomach. The other Lords glowed with the spirit of their animor and their creature. The Wolf Lord had pointed teeth behind her dark red lipstick, and she stood in a mannikin pose as if she was aware of exactly how good she looked naked. Like Delphine, she probably half-starved herself to mould
her body into the new slender fashion for women. Her hair was certainly in line with the current mode—black and sharply bobbed.

The Panther Lord bristled with dark hair down his arms and stomach. His stance was defensive, perhaps because of the nasty scars and raw skin across his body. It looked as if his stomach had recently been ripped apart and put back together.
Ash did that
, Velody realised, scenting a trace of Ashiol’s animor on the Panther Lord’s skin. The Pigeon Lord stood as if unaware of his nakedness, unselfconscious of his large, bulging stomach and drooping penis. His arms were bulky too, but there was firm muscle there beneath the fat. He raised an eyebrow at Velody, as if waiting for a polite answer to his polite question.

‘My name is Priest,’ he said. ‘Whom is it that we are honoured to address this nox?’

Kelpie and Macready stood at the back of the crowd of naked courtesi. Crane joined them now. All three sentinels had their skysilver blades at the ready, and Velody knew they would defend her if she needed them to.

But this was her fight.

‘I’m Velody,’ she said, and couldn’t think of anything else to add.

An intense sensation like a headache rolled over the top of her scalp, and she looked up a few seconds before everyone else. Something boiled out of the sky, a dark red cloud that did not look as though it belonged there.

Dealing with this crisis was suddenly more tempting than thinking of something witty or threatening or conciliatory to say to the Creature Court. Velody pulled her dress off over her head and kicked her sandals to the grass before turning chimaera and leaping headfirst up into the sky.

She had barely practised this form, but it felt like an old skill. She knew exactly how to push her animor against the firm gravity of the earth to launch herself impossibly high, catching the slightest eddies and breezes with her
powerful, expert wings to propel herself higher and faster. The impossibility of it dizzied her, but there was little point in worrying about that now.
The word ‘impossible’ is for daylight, apparently. Not nox.

The red cloud pulled Velody towards it like a lantern in the fog. She spun and danced higher into the air. Reaching the danger, it seemed, was not a problem.
What the saints do I do when I get there?

She wasn’t alone. A second black figure swooped at her side, a chimaera who throbbed with familiar power.
Unless you’d like to handle this yourself?
a thought-voice suggested.

Are you kidding?
she shot back.
I have no idea what I’m doing!

It’s simple enough
, sent Ashiol.
The red cloud is the seed of a deathstorm. If we stop it now, we can save ourselves having to battle devils, angels and flaming hail all nox.

Real angels and devils?

Let’s concentrate on the current threat, shall we? Deal with philosophy later. There’s one tried and true method to vanquishing a skyseed. The theory is something like lancing a boil.

Velody winced at the thought of it.
Just as long as I don’t end up covered in pus.

She couldn’t see any facial expressions in his black and shapeless chimaera form, but she felt him smile.
Maybe you’d better wait for me on the ground.

Oh hells.

Not today I hope. Can you form a couple of long, sharp claws?

Velody thought of the claw that Ashiol had formed to gut Poet with.
I think so.

Right. We aim for the centre of the cloud. As much force as you can manage. Throw everything you have into the blow.

Everything? Won’t we need some animor left to fly down?

This is a tricky thing to try—best not hold anything back. With any luck, the Creature Lords will catch us if we completely drain ourselves.

She thought of Poet bleeding on the grass, the outrage on Priest’s face as his gull courtesa was hurt, and the arrogant expressions of the Wolf and Panther Lords.
We’re relying on that lot to save our lives?

They’re surprisingly good at that sort of thing.

They were close to the red cloud now. Its boiling, swirling substance was beginning to fold a second colour into its dark centre, an odd purplish shade.

Now, before it’s too late!
sent Ashiol.
One, two…three!

In that instant, as they drove long clawed limbs into the centre of the dark cloud, it was as if their minds were connected, as if they had merged bodies and spirits. Velody could feel herself inside Ashiol’s skin, taste the blood in his arteries.

He didn’t say whether we were going on three or after three
, she thought stupidly.
I knew anyway. This is all a little too close for comfort.

You’re telling me?
sent Ashiol as their claws tore harder into the core of the skyseed.

There was a loud squelching sound, and Velody was back in her body again—her real body, wet and vulnerable. Wet? There was a sticky, gluey substance all over her skin, her face and hair, but that was less disturbing than the fact that she was falling out of the sky like an acorn in autumn.

A shock wave jolted through her body, and her arm screamed with pain so fierce that she thought it had been pulled clear off. But, no. Ashiol had caught her by the hand. She hung limply from him as he hovered in the air, his Lord form still intact.

She tried to think a response to him, but that didn’t seem to work without their chimaera bodies to interpret. ‘Well,’ she gasped, after coughing to clear her throat of the sticky sky fluid. ‘Now we know.’

‘Know what?’ he asked, unsmiling, making no attempt to catch hold of her by anything other than her single hand.