Their second attempt at locating Gate Square went far better than the first, the rain finally stopping and then a group of armed, hooded figures giving them very thorough directions. These strangers happened to be headed that way themselves and offered to escort the out-of-towners, but Nemi explained she had a bit of a limp and would only slow them down. The helpful citizens bid them farewell and went on their way, which seemed to pleasantly surprise Diggelby and Nemi—perhaps Sullen had missed some nuance of the Crimson exchange.
Dark as the city had been, sputtering rushlights now danced through windows and doorways and down the street, more and more hooded folk leaving their houses and all moving in the same direction. There was a strange atmosphere to the thickening throng, at times reverential and at others carnivalesque, certain figures with large wicker masks playing pitch pipes and drums. They spilled out into a wide boulevard, where the river of hoods and bobbing lights flowed in the direction they were supposed to turn to reach Diadem’s Gate. Directing Sullen and Diggelby over to an ornamental arch in the side of an arcade, Nemi kept her voice low as she expressed her doubts over their ability to slip into the Gate unnoticed on such a night as this.
“Does seem a popular destination,” observed Diggelby, rubbernecking the crowd. “Some sort of harvest festival, I imagine.”
“A harvest festival?” asked Nemi incredulously. “At the end of winter, in the middle of the night?”
“Apparently,” said Diggelby, pointing at passersby. “Notice all the sickles and flails? Not much practical call for those in a modern city, but country gods have a long memory for how homage ought to be paid. And that drumming and piping is to warn the devils out of the fields, give the blighters notice that cold iron will soon be reaping.”
“You know the weirdest stuff,” said Sullen.
“I know how to party, and fluently, anywhere you care to get down.” Diggelby flagged down a figure carrying a bushel of rushlights under one arm. “Hullo hullo, how are you this fine evening?”
“Three?” said a sweaty face under a woolen cowl. “Three for three penny.”
“Better make it nine,” said Diggelby, rubbing thumb and forefinger at Nemi. “We’re meeting friends.”
“Uh-huh,” said the seller, counting out nine of the fat-dipped reeds.
“Hopefully we can find them before we embarrass ourselves,” Diggelby went on. “We’re visiting from the sticks, and back home on the farm we ring in the harvest a mite different. Be a chum and give us the basics of your fancy metropolitan festival, so nobody mistakes us for yokels?”
“Uh?” The seller took the coins Nemi offered and handed over the rushlights. “Well, them’s that want take they candle and carry it afore the queen. Then go home.”
“Afore the queen!” said Diggelby. “And this virtuous maid chosen by the old ways to be queen of the harvest, where might we find this blessed creature?”
“Uh?” The seller seemed perplexed. “Front of the Gate? And’s not no blessed maid, it’s the queen.”
“Quite so, quite so,” agreed Diggelby.
The seller turned to reenter the scrum, but paused and said, “It’s a danger, not wearing hood nor mask.”
“Why is that?” asked Nemi, apparently more in line with Sullen’s thinking about all this business. Unlike Diggelby, he wasn’t so cavalier about jumping headfirst into other people’s parties.
“People’s Pack’s watchin’,” said the seller, pulling their own hood lower over their face at the mention of Diadem’s council. “Till light of day any can pay they respect and say farewell to the queen. Call it the am-nasty. But after … you don’t want any knowin’ your face as one what came afore the queen. Wear a hood.”
Then the seller turned back against the flow, moving upstream to peddle their rushlights as the interlopers considered these parting words.
“Well, that’s sinister,” said Sullen.
“Not really,” said Diggelby. “It’s just the nature of these folk traditions; they’re all for show. You have to take it seriously, of course, to offer your belief as payment for the harvest, but these things aren’t literal. Would that the Chain put a little more stock in actual faith and a lot less in actual black magic we’d all be happier, hmmm?”
“Diggelby, do you not recall that merchant we met on the road yesterday morning?” asked Nemi, taking a rushlight for herself and passing him the rest.
“Ardeth Karnov,” said Diggelby in a simply terrible impression of the man’s Usban accent. “Who could forget such a memorable … sorry, who were we talking about?”
“The merchant who told us he’d heard the People’s Pack put Queen Indsorith on trial and intended to execute her for crimes against her citizens,” said Nemi.
“No no,” said Diggelby, “I remembered who Karnov was, I was just being silly because you said … ohhhhhhh.”
“Well, Indsorith is bad, right?” said Sullen, the dull echo of drums carrying down the crumbling urban ravines to lodge right in his sore stomach. “I mean, Ji-hyeon was trying to take her down the whole time, so she’s got to be a villain.”
“I always thought our general had a rather elementary understanding of Imperial politics if she thought Indsorith was personally responsible for very much,” said Diggelby, but he sounded like he’d lost all his enthusiasm for gatecrashing in either sense of the term. “Crimson Queen or Black Pope or People’s Pack, they all just end up as symbols for whatever we want, don’t they? We lose sight of who they actually are, behind the masks.”
There were all quiet for a moment, and Sullen cleared his throat. “Diggelby, how high are you right now?”
“Not nearly high enough,” said the pasha, popping his lace collar and pulling his tricorn hat down low over his paisley eye makeup. “But yes, all right, fairly bloody loaded. This is going to be great.”
“This?” asked Nemi. “What do you mean, this? Tonight’s ritual sacrifice of the queen is obviously a onetime event, so we will find a place to stay and wait for tomorrow night to go through the Gate. There’s no flipping way I’m trying to take us tonight, the conditions would not allow me to concentrate.”
“Diggelby thinks he’s going to pitch our case to the People’s Pack in the middle of their execution of the old queen,” said Sullen, those fucking flutes making his heart pound, and when his heart pounded his guts fucking tried to dance back out of the hole in his stomach. The thought of a queen standing over a Gate conjured the image of the Faceless Mistress so fast and so hard Sullen practically saw her peer around the block, and closed his eyes to make sure she didn’t actually materialize. When he’d first arrived in Diadem and noticed all the recent fire damage he had been fool enough to hope that maybe Zosia had already tried and failed to fulfill the dread vision he’d glimpsed in Emeritus, but then Nemi had explained to him just what exactly a volcano was, and how this city was supposedly built right on top of one, and that was the end of Sullen’s fair-weather fantasies. Somewhere far beneath his boots an ocean of fire bubbled and crashed, and gritting his teeth, he concentrated on the cool shaft of the spear in his hand.
“If we interrupt their ceremony and they take offense we may find ourselves unable to use the Gate to reach Othean tomorrow,” said Nemi, leaning on her feathered staff as she straightened the damp cover on her cockatrice’s cage. “Or something yet worse might happen.”
“But if we don’t try we’ll never know if Diadem would have helped turn the tide against the midnight armies of the First Dark,” said Diggelby, and now he was playing hard to Sullen’s sensibilities; midnight armies of the First Dark was fleet as fuck, no doubt. “I’ll take charge and you two lurk about inconspicuously. That way if things go buns up you can both slip away and go to Othean tomorrow.”
“And if they take you, Diggelby, what am I supposed to tell Purna?” asked Sullen, trying to make himself believe that tonight’s worst-case scenario was just their reuniting with their friends sans the pasha.
“Oh tosh, I’m nobility—even if they capture me I’m worth more as a ransom than as a rug.”
“I am not certain a council of revolting peasants will take good care of a nobleman,” said Nemi, fiddling with the ironbound egg canisters on her belt.
“You heard her!” crowed Diggelby. “She was the one who called them revolting, not me!”
Mistaking Nemi and Sullen’s silent reproach for a failure to appreciate his wit, he began to explain it when Sullen silenced him with a great big hug, badly though it pained him. If this well-intentioned ninny was willing to charge straight into a confrontation with the most powerful people in Diadem, then he would damn sure have his friend to back him up. And they’d do it without anyone getting hurt, Sullen would see to that.
Or so he hoped, looking up at the bundled head of his spear. He’d wrapped the blade in so many layers of pelts and straps that he couldn’t have stuck someone with it even if he wanted to. As they stepped back into the flow of the crowd, he repeated his vow to himself to unsheathe it only when they faced a monstrous foe. He was done with shedding human blood, the boy in the bar the final victim of his savage past. He would find a better way, no matter what, and never again be forced into violence against his fellow mortals.
Why oh why oh why did Sullen ever let himself hope anything?