Bracinta is buoyed by the irresistible tide of The King, the King! Those viziers heavily invested in there not being a king are unaccountably not present. A few might have fled, either to one foreign army or the other, or else just away with whatever portable wealth they could grab. Plenty of others didn’t have the opportunity, caught elbow deep in the treasury or struggling into nondescript disguises. Just as the succession struggle of twenty years back wasn’t bloodless, so the restoration has its share of dripping knives. But more discreet, not a city-wide clash of factions but a piece of surgery, the diseased organs neatly sectioned out and cast dripping to the floor.
The coronation is a long and tedious piece of incomprehensible ritual. The Pal Higher Orders and the Loruthi command stand through it, on either side of a big dais and separated by a stand of important Bracites. Halseder is at the king’s shoulder, and an old woman in the moth-eaten skin of a catwolf places the crown on the young prince’s head. And then there’s a torc and some chains, and rings, and a whole extra mantle, and some designs drawn on the youth’s narrow chest, and a lot of poetry. Really quite a lot of poetry, so that the Pals and the Loruthi end up casting exasperated looks at each other, united for once in this small thing.
After which, Feder the Lost is King Feder of Bracinta, Fourth of His Name. Heir to a crumbling land that has been going to seed under misgovernment and the tramping of foreign armies. Armies whose stated intent at all times has been the protection of poor, leaderless Bracinta. It feels as though all Magnelei is holding its breath to see what those foreign powers will do now, even as messengers ride out of every gate to tell the rest of the kingdom to inhale deeply too.
And now the feast. And Halseder’s people are stage-managing fit to be the envy of every theatrical impresario. No Pal junior officer is going to run unexpectedly into their Loruthi opposite number and start a brawl. No acerbic remark in Pel is going to be overheard and used as a casus belli. The two delegations are swollen with soldiers and more than capable of taking the palace if they wanted, so long as they aren’t facing their rivals and the Bracites united. They are handled with the utmost care and delicacy and never allowed to meet. Until they file into the great royal hall, cleaned and dusted, and with all the regalia and bunting of state hastily hung. There they get to stare at one another. Two long tables, each dominating one of the long sides of the chamber, separated only by space. At the high end, on a raised platform, the king sits enthroned with his advisors, the architects of the restoration ready to dine in their places of honour. And every intelligencer, advisor and local expert on both sides is whispering in the ear of their superiors. This man hates that one, their family has traditionally opposed every movement of their ancestral enemy. The coalition that has placed this boy-king on the throne looks eminently fracturable. All it would take is to place the chisel very carefully, then a sharp rap with the hammer and Bracinta will shatter. The only challenge is making sure that it shatters in a way beneficial to the hands that hold the tools. You can be sure that plans are already being laid and the correct grade of chisel chosen, on both sides. Any impartial observer would already be reckoning that the newly sovereign Bracinta is in for a brief and eventful period of royal rule.
And those on either side not immediately scheming to bring down their noble hosts are staring across that gap at the opposition, fingering the bewildering selection of cutlery that Bracite formal dining uses and thinking bloody thoughts. At some point, when one side or the other slips too far into their cups, someone will give the word. The soldiers will rush in. The Wolf Palace will see another massacre and, although most of the blood won’t be local, plenty of people will be caught between the lines and that impartial observer wouldn’t give much for the longevity of the king either. Give everyone a charged baton and someone will want to turn regicide, just for the bragging rights.
*
In the kitchens, Lidlet frets, because Jack’s not back yet. He and Banders went to the army camp, and that was the last anyone saw of either. And Lidlet still thinks they need Jack for this, even though Jack said they didn’t.
A lack of kings does not mean that the kitchens of the Wolf Palace sat empty. A succession of viziers and their special advisors – Loruthi and Pal – have dined wide on the bounty of the rudderless state. The parties, at the common expense, were legendary. Hence the royal chefs are more than equal to their task. Even after shifting over to let their new colleague work. Bracite cuisine is a complex thing of many flavours. Many dishes are too fiery for Pals or too sour for Loruthi but between the extremes is a subtle palette of delights fit for every mouth.
“Stop pacing. You’re getting in the way.” Tallifer sits by the big ovens. She’s cold now. Mazdek went with Jack, in his box. Because she’d had a presentiment, honestly. When she and Ollery cooked up their exit, she’d seen her bony length stretched out on the ground. So after springing Jack, she’d coaxed her god into his care. So Mazdek would have someone, when she was gone. Except it was Lochiver who died, the senile clown, and somehow she lived. And now she’s cold.
Lidlet has stopped pacing, and now every part of her is fidgeting with nerves. She is here as Jack’s stand-in. The rest of the faithful, Foley and the others, are still outside the city with orders to just run if they don’t hear news by nightfall. Lidlet isn’t convinced about this plan that Masty and Jack have thrown together, and Tallifer isn’t, either.
“You could at least take off the uniform,” Tallifer tells her. She’s dressed as a Bracite woman, several layers of robe huddled about her. But Lidlet’s worn the charcoal grey since she enlisted at seventeen. Nothing else fits her.
She starts pacing again.
*
In the great hall, the food begins to issue out under the ministration of a seemingly endless train of servants. The king is served first, along with his high table. Masty – his Majesty Feder the Fourth – looks at it without much appetite. Feeling a bit sick, honestly. This is the last thing he wanted. Under no circumstances has he been hiding royal ambitions. Oh, back then, obviously. Back when he first came to the camp, and was being held as an Important Person, he strutted about in his tiny fancy clothes and told everyone how he would be going to claim his throne and they should all address him the proper way. They were, after all, a foreign ally committed to help him return to power and punish all the bad people. Six year-old Feder shrilling orders at unamused grown men and women of Palleseen. You shall call me ‘Your Majesty!’ Which they had, but with such utter mockery and disrespect that it had slurred into Masty, and eventually he’d started answering to that. Eventually he’d taken refuge in it. Lost his special status. Been forgotten, as events moved on. Slipped through the cracks and become just one more Whitebelly following orders rather than giving them. There’s a certain comfort in that. A lack of responsibility. That was the person Masty had discovered inside himself, when all the silks and graces had been stripped away. Someone who loved doing his duty and hated having power over others.
There are worse people to be king, maybe.
The high table starts eating, because that’s how it’s done. Now the weaving chains of decorated servants are very carefully placing dishes down the tables of their foreign visitors, each side of the room a perfect mirror of the other, no preference or precedence shown, and everyone served immaculately in order of seniority. Scaffesty’s bowls set down at the exact same moment as the magnificently bearded Loruthi Grand Marshal across from him, and so on down the ladder of ranks to the lowliest there. Who is not overly lowly, given how exclusive this event is.
In the middle of that ladder sits Fellow-Invigilator Maserley, there by virtue of his place as head of a department of one. There’s no seat for Caeleen, of course, so she stands behind his chair, utterly out of place despite her uniform. But he’s keeping her close, these days. A certain oath is ringing in his ears. He doesn’t trust what she and the ex-priest might get up to, even now the priest’s god is – as he believes – dead.
And there’s something weirdly familiar about the king. Not an afficionado of royalty, Maserley, which is why it’s so odd to look on the aquiline face of Feder and think, I know you…
He scrabbles for the associations. This is not a man to be set above him, surely. This is an underling. A menial. Is he just finding these Bracites all a bit similar to one another, perhaps? No, it’s more than that…
A stab of unease lances into him, because he does know the king. This man, crowned and enthroned and painted and decorated like the most ridiculous mummer, this is one of the hospital menials. He almost stands up right then and decries the man as a sham, rubbishes the whole coronation. Except there were a thousand Bracites out there who didn’t complain, and it’s not like they could all be in on something.
He frowns. He can tell that something’s up, but not what. He looks up the line of his fellows towards Scaffesty and notes an empty chair.
Prassel has gone.
A bowl is placed before him but Maserley puts down his spoon, suddenly lacking appetite.
*
Prassel has gone to the kitchens. She’s a step ahead of Maserley on the suspicion stakes and what she sees there confirms exactly what she thought.
She should just go, obviously. Go tell Old Eyeball and everyone else what’s going on. This is exactly the sort of thing she can’t tolerate, not now she’s got her promotion and planned a future for the discipline more palatable than Stiverton’s theatrics.
At the big oven, the Butcher turns to regard her, and all the Bracite chefs and kitchen staff pointedly leave a nice clear line between them. To stand there would be to ignite, given the intensity of their crossed gaze.
“Chief,” says Prassel. “New job, is it?”
“Magister,” the Butcher rumbles. He steps carefully away from his pots, gesturing at one of the locals to take over. Two heavy steps forwards and he rolls his shoulders like a wrestler. Prassel’s hand hangs close to the little charged rod holstered at her belt.
“Or back to your old ways?” she prompts.
Ollery’s smile is pure bland murder. Like it always was, under whatever expression he stretched over the top. When he picked over the wounded, when he cooked for the department, when he took his lashes from the Alder, that smile was festering under the surface. The most notorious killer of all Pallesand.
He goes for her. From still to an unstoppable force in the blink of an eye. She gets the rod from her belt but fumbles the word, and then he has her. Huge hands like the paws of a bear have her jacket. Her back hits the wall hard enough that her breath, and all the killing words it might have formed, it all goes out of her.
His great, thick fingers find her throat. She drags a knife from her belt and tries to bury it in his neck. The sheer bulk of his shoulders means she can only get his biceps, but she sinks it to the hilt there. He grunts. His fingers don’t loosen, but they don’t clench, either.
“Don’t make me,” he tells her.
“I can’t let you do this.”
“They’re already laying the tables. Everyone’s tucking in,” says the Butcher. “A feast fit for a king.”
“You’re poisoning Masty too?”
The Butcher’s chuckle is like tar. “Did you not see my old cruet at the top table? Only the best condiments for the King and his advisors. Remarkably fortifying, what’s in those jars. And they won’t drink, at the end. The real kicker’s what’s in the bottles. The king’s health, eh?” He releases one hand to make a gesture, lifting a phantom cup to his lips.
Prassel stares at him. Feels the slightest relaxation in his grip and takes her chance. Rams a knee up right into the Butcher’s groin and is out of his hold, past the bulk of him and out of the kitchen. Running, knife and rod left behind, but all the weapon she needs is her voice. Shoving past startled servants, mouth open, lungs full, about to bellow her prophecy of doom out of the kitchens and all the way into the feast hall.
No words come out. Barely any breath. The faintest croak. She fights, but all the air she just drew in has found a home in her and likes it there, and won’t come out.
She’s dizzy, and when a hand draws her back from the doorway and out of sight, she has no strength to resist it. And besides, they were all tucking in there. Pals and Loruthi watching one another like hawks, but sampling every delicacy set before them. Each side counting down until they send for their soldiers and liberate the palace from everyone except themselves.
And Prassel can only assume she’s poisoned too, because there is no breath in or out of her mouth, and her vision is swimming. Except, when she lurches free of the hand on her and turns around, it’s not the Butcher. It’s another of her wilful subordinates. It’s Alv.
Alv came back. After walking into the wilds, picking a direction and pretending the Divine City was at the end of it. Walk enough steps and she realised she was walking to nowhere. She couldn’t go home. She had so offended the balance of the world, so brutalised the precepts of her mystery, that her fellow Divinati would subtract her from the universe as the only way to make right the wrong she had become.
So she was left with only one place she belonged, which no longer existed because the hospital department had torn itself apart. But the people persisted, and so she had found them.
And here she is, with one hand reaching for Prassel and the other pincered about her own throat. Clutched tight at her own windpipe, so that Prassel can’t speak, can’t warn anyone, can’t breathe.
The necromancer’s eyes bulge. She scrabbles at Alv, but there’s no strength to her. When she falls, Lidlet’s there to catch her. To lock her up in a storeroom where, when she wakes, she can’t be in the way. Because there were worse heads of department than Fellow-Inquirer Prassel, in the end, so she’s spared what happens next.
Then Alv and Lidlet return to the kitchens to find a welcome new arrival. Jack’s back, along with Banders. The gang’s together again. Those that lived.
The Butcher regards his arm, the rent in his shirt and the unmarked skin below. Alv dabs at the gash in her own. It’s nothing. She will stretch it from here to the end of her days and it will barely register at all.
“You,” Lidlet says, “are late.”
“Honestly, this uniform was grand for getting into the camp,” Jack says. “Not so much the palace. Banders had to talk her jaw off to make them understand who we were. How are we doing?”
“It’s done,” says the Butcher, with coffin-lid finality.
In Jack’s ear comes God’s peevish voice. “I do not condone this in any way.”
“Well we’re committed. Off you go,” Jack tells Him. “Who’s got my clothes?”
They do him up as a Bracite servant. And he doesn’t look particularly Bracite in the face, but who looks at servants anyway?
“Someone let Masty know we’re all in place,” he says. “His Majesty, sorry. I’m going out there. Everyone ready?” He’s talking to fast, too nervously. They nod, those who still have a role to play. Ollery, Tallifer. In his head a high whine of a voice says, Ready.
*
Out in the hall, a seneschal strikes a chime, demanding quiet. Pad-footed servants circulate, bearing deserts. One of them is Jack, out of step and trying to mimic their effortless grace.
His Majesty Feder IV rises to his feet, lifting his goblet. His light voice is carried down the hall by acoustics. “My loyal subjects,” he says, “my supporters, those who have restored me to my place after so long,” and inwardly hating them for it, and hating himself for letting them do it. He could have walked away. He’d escaped this nonsense the once. But he had a duty, in the end, and Masty has never shirked his duties. Not a duty to this country he barely remembers, but to his friends.
“And my allies from overseas,” he adds, tilting his glass down an exacting middle line that shows favour to neither side. “Those who have safeguarded my kingdom in my absence, whose fatherly advice has guided my people, what would we have done without you?” And he’s speaking Pel, of course, but even the Loruthi speak Pel because they deal with many different nations and it’s a language designed for ease of use. And Pel is a straightforward language, and so the King’s words cannot possibly hint at the two armies that have been scouring vast tracts of his kingdom to corrupted mud, after spending two decades robbing it blind.
“There is a toast amongst my people,” Masty lies, given that they’re not really his people any more and it isn’t one of their toasts anyway. “Think only on this, my friends. That we are grateful for the blessings and aid of strangers.” He and Jack spent an age on the wording, and so the words sound flat and meaningless to him.
On Jack’s shoulder, God scoffs. “A travesty,” He says. “I have never seen such a mockery of My rites. I am done with you, Yasnic. This is the last straw.”
“Yes, yes.” Jack watches them drink, high table and low, Loruthi and Pal. And some of them murmured the toast with the king, but all of them at least had the words in their head. He’s been reading the Loopholes himself. He reckons it just about counts.
Then he’s at Maserley’s elbow. The man hasn’t lifted his goblet, Jack sees, and that might be a problem. Jack tops up the receptacle of the man at Maserley’s elbow, and murmurs. “I haven’t forgotten my oath.”
The demonist jolts in his chair and cranes round incredulously at him, for a moment just seeing another servant, impossibly impertinent. Then recognising him, eyes going wide. With fury, with outrage. With fear, perhaps, just a little.
“And what,” he hisses back, “will you do with your oath?” Abruptly he’s on his feet, heedless of propriety. “You, move up,” he tells the man on his right. “Get them all to move up. Do it!”
Because Prassel’s seat remains empty, they can shift up one. And the man beside him obviously thinks he’s going to get Caeleen nestled in beside him, and doesn’t mind that in the least. Instead, though, he gets Jack dragged down into the vacated seat, and Maserley has a rod in his hand, held under the level of the table.
“You stay right here, Maric Jack,” the demonist says. “You stay here and enjoy the show, and then I’ll march you right back to camp and we’ll pick up where we left off, shall we?”
Jack shrugs, sits, even samples the wine if Maserley isn’t going to. His heart is hammering. He forces his eyes not to follow little suggestions of movement.. A flick of antennae as something burrows away, seeking the right host to lay its much-reduced eggs of chaos in.
“Now, my friends,” calls the king, “I have asked you here in thanks for your nations’ invaluable aid over these turbulent years, yes, but also to speak about the future. The future of my nation. The future of your armies. I would like to introduce you to my negotiators, who will explain to you your new position.”
Both parties are very tense. That the young king would try to flex his puny muscles was expected, certainly. They each have an army. The king has, at best, a rabble of militia, poorly armed and untrained. Bracinta will not be dictating to either of the two global powers squabbling over it. But let the boy enjoy his day on the throne. He threw a good feast, after all. To shut him down now would be rude, whereas to dethrone or make a puppet of him tomorrow will just be statecraft.
The negotiators enter. They are none of them Bracite. In fact, two of them are Pals in uniform and one is some other breed of foreigner. An old Jarokiri woman done up like a local. The Loruthi are already unsettled, those two uniforms preparing them for the worst. But, as it turns out, they have no idea what the worst actually is.
“Listen to me,” says Tallifer, “I’m not talking to Pallesand or Lor. I’m not even talking to the soldiers out in the camps, or the soldiers in the city. I’m talking to you, magisters. You senior officers, the great men and women of the war. A very personal message.” She looks them over. She can only guess, with the Loruthi, but they’ve got Scaffesty and most of his staff, a representative selection of Higher Orders. And obviously neither side would have brought their entire command, but enough of the heads of both snakes has come in through the palace doors. “You’re all dead,” she tells them, with considerable glee.
They stare at her, and at each other, and don’t really understand.
“My name is Ollery,” says the Butcher. “I am the Butcher of Revelation House.”
The Loruthi are blank. So are half the Pals. The other half are troubled by old recollection. An event so ghastly, so unthinkable, that it was the only topic of conversation across all the Archipelago a decade and a half ago. A few of them suddenly put down their cups, far too late.
“The substance in question,” the Butcher goes on, “is a blend of my own. The same as I am known for, only four times the concentration. A mercy, really. You want to go swift, when you’ve had that. You don’t want to linger.”
Which begs a question, obviously. And there is an uproar of angry military personnel asking it, of him and each other and the universe general. Nobody is dead. Hence, nobody has been fatally poisoned by the Butcher of Revelation House. This is all some peculiar Bracite entertainment and any moment now the jugglers will come in and everyone will applaud.
“You are all blessed, magisters,” says Lidlet. God is with her now, having abandoned Jack in disgust. He sits, visible only to the two of them, thin arms folded, scowling at everything. “The blessing has saved you from the poison even before it could act on you. You’re saved.” And this makes it sound even more like some bizarre ritual exchange, an ancient Bracite mystery play as baffling and opaque as all that poetry. “But there is a condition.” And the servants are passing round again, and each of the long tables gets a couple of copies of The Ninety-Seven Loopholes. Because it’s only fair they know the rules.
“If you do harm,” Lidlet announces. “If you take any action that would lead to harm, an order, a gesture, then the blessing will be withdrawn from you. And you get the poison back.” And she opens her arms, an inviting target. She knows her own people well enough. There’s always some mid-ranker who got there through family and not capability, and thinks they know better.
In this case it’s a Fellow-Broker on Scaffesty’s staff who stands up and snaps, “That’s enough from you, deserter!” Dragging a rod from his belt and discharging it straight at Lidlet. And that’s utter chaos because everyone’s armed and everyone came here expecting treachery and both delegations are leaping up and fumbling for their weapons. And stopping. Staring.
Lidlet was shot. They all saw that. The charred rosette in her jacket stands mute testimony to it. She went down to one knee, though she’s standing again now. The Fellow-Broker is not. He’s lying across the table, red froth at his lips, writhing, spasming, the rod springing from his fingers to ring against a soup tureen. Kicking, gurgling in his own blood, eyes standing out from his head like there’s a thumb behind each one of them, tongue black and blistering between his lips. And dead, and the Butcher makes a clearly audible tsk sound, like next time he’ll up the dose a little because that took longer than he liked.
“Does anybody else want a go?” Lidlet asks them. She still has her arms out. The smile she was trying for has slipped somewhat because of what they’ve all just watched, but she’s committed to her part.
“Any harm,” Tallifer takes up. “Any of you. Write an order, delegate, weasel it however you want.” She takes great pleasure in drawing a thin finger across her throat.
And Scaffesty says, into the silence that follows, “But we’re officers, commanding an army. In a war.”
“Good luck with that,” she says. “You might want to start ordering some retreats. I imagine you can do that.” And it’s not like they’ve killed the war stone dead, but they’ve most certainly put the boot into its groin hard enough to make it catch its breath and take stock. And perhaps cooler heads might prevail, and perhaps Bracinta will get the chance to pick itself up, and perhaps something else might come along, in that pause, that will make the resumption of hostilities less attractive to the great powers. Or perhaps not, but they’ve done all they can.
“Enough!” Maserley stands, a man who didn’t eat or drink the wine finding himself in a roomful of enforced pacifists. He has his own rod, and he has a hand on Jack’s shoulder, and his moment has finally arrived. “I am walking out of here now, with this man,” he announces to all and sundry. “I am going to our soldiers, the ones bivouacked outside the palace. I will explain to them precisely what treachery has transpired here, and then we will execute every last one of you, Bracite and Loruthi both. Unless there’s anyone over there who didn’t drink? No?” His smile is brilliant, the one bright spot in the room. “Well then, it appears to be my game. Come on.” And he hauls the unresisting Jack to his feet and gets halfway down the table before Caeleen says, “Come back.”
He comes back. He’s not entirely sure why. “With me,” he tells her. “Now.”
She regards him. “On your knees,” she says, before the whole assembled muster.
Maserley kneels down like his legs aren’t his own. “How dare—”
“Bark,” Caeleen says. “Like dogs do.”
“Woof,” says Maserley. He’s not very good at it. It’s not something he’s had to do before. Towards the end of the table a junior aide breaks into an involuntary guffaw before clamping her hands to her mouth. It’s only a shame Prassel is locked up right now. She’d love this.
After he’s done barking, not very much like a dog, Maserley manages to get out, “How?” But Caeleen isn’t done with him.
“Go home,” she tells him, and he just has time to understand. The expression of horror and misery on his face will stay with everyone there a long time.
He turns to run, but even in that he’s doing what he’s told. He flees but it’s as though there’s a vast abyss of distance that exists just for Maserley. A great horizon that he recedes towards, some dark and hideous land, twisted in a way that offends the eye. And blazing, because everyone knows the Realms Below burn forever. And then Maserley is gone.
Zenotheus crawls back into Jack’s box to warm itself by Mazdek. To find a corner well away from the slumbering lump that is Sturge. And there’s very little that the least agent of chaos in the world can really accomplish. But switching two names on a piece of paper is just about within its gift. Names positioned to denote master and servant in a contract, let’s say.
Maserley will be a grand prize for the Kings Below. They’ll keep him a long time. They’ll make sure he lives, although he won’t enjoy it. But Caeleen, being a demon, can’t be expected to feel overly sympathetic.
After all that excitement, it’s Masty’s turn again.
“You will want to return to your followers, of course,” he tells all assembled. “You will want to be very careful about just what you tell them. Perhaps you will step aside for men still capable of continuing the war. That would be the selfless and dutiful step. It depends on how you value your own careers and positions. I’m sure both your governments will still honour and value officers who can’t give the order to advance any more. Or you could go. Fall back from my city. Cease to ravage my countryside and my people. And send your ambassadors and diplomats. I will be happy to receive them. Although I would counsel against instructing any assassins, for obvious reasons. Even an agent provocateur might be too much. I’m sure you’ll work out the boundaries of your situation by trial and error.” He nods towards the twisted corpse of the Fellow-Broker.
One by one the guests begin to file out of the grand hall, looking sick, barely daring to jostle each other or tread on the wrong toe, just in case.