A Plague of Swords by Miles Cameron
Blanche was standing in the middle of the small hall, listening to the music. Her eyes were half closed, and her hips moved, suggesting how she might dance, and her elbows moved enough to show how her arms might move. It was quite unconscious, but Gabriel thought it unutterably lovely, and noted, too, that both of the older ladies’ feet were moving, tapping, in time to the rich, complex notes.
Gabriel had a moment of what he had to confess to himself was jealousy as he saw her regard for the “infidel” knight, but Pavalo looked up from his music and grinned, and Blanche turned...
The impact she had on him remained the same. When she turned, and he saw her recognize him, and the instant smile that spread across her face, his heart seemed to explode. Irritation, fatigue, fear of the future and the plague—
Gone.
He took her hand and kissed her on the lips before he considered what he was doing, and where he was. Young Heloise turned her head away and blushed. Her mother smiled, and Lady Natalia smiled too.
I am a fool, Gabriel thought.
Part of him didn’t care.
He sat by her, the two of them pushed against each other, sharing a stool, as Payam played another piece, this one very fast indeed, a thunderstorm of notes. And when the Ifiquy’an was done, they all applauded. He rose and gave a little bow with a broad grin.
“I found this in the hall,” he said. “I saw it and I thought—that is something of my home. And lo, it is. It has taken me four days to teach it to play again, but it is a very fine instrument of its kind, and I like to think perhaps it was placed here so that I might please you all. There has been too much war and not enough dance.”
Gabriel smiled and caught his eye. “You have the right of it,” he said. Then, quietly, “Where is Harmodius?”
“He is working.” The paynim knight shrugged eloquently. “He told me to go and make my mirth elsewhere, so I took him to mean this, and he is a good prophet.”
“You have all but mastered Alban,” Gabriel said.
“My master has always told me I was a quick study,” Payam said with a sparkle. “But Master Harmodius has known me since I was a child, and he came into my head and began to teach me. Very rapidly.” Payam’s words were accurate but his diction was odd, very slow, almost too elegant.
Gabriel nodded again and ran his fingers through his beard, which was longer than usual. “He is exceptionally good at that,” Gabriel said.
“It is the same with my own master,” Payam said. “When something is important, always he can come into my head and teach me. If only the teachers at madrassa had been able to do this, perhaps I would be an imam and not a mere warrior.”
Blanche beamed at him. “You are not a mere warrior. You have saved me twice, and the queen, and the young king—and you are as beautiful as a dancer when you fight.”
Gabriel was aware of another stab wound near his heart. But Payam smiled.
“That is beautiful of you to say, Lady Blanche, and I will treasure this compliment like a necklace of jewels left me by my mother. But I have only done my duty.” He nodded again. “And speaking of duty, I must go and see to whatever Master Harmodius may require.”
Even as he spoke, Gabriel felt the accession of ops and its near-instantaneous remaking as potentia.
“Do not open his door,” Gabriel said, rising.
Payam looked a question but obeyed.
Gabriel felt the release of the power, like the breaking of a dam, and it rolled away into the night, spreading seedpods or mayflies of power as it moved. One alit on Blanche’s nose, and one on Gabriel’s forehead, and one on Payam...in a single heartbeat, Gabriel saw that there was a point of fire on everyone in the room, and in his hermetical sight, he could perceive the sparks alighting on everyone in the castle, even as a single bolt of constructed working sped east into the darkness.
Gabriel did not lightly allow another’s power to have access to him. He queried the tiny working, examined it, and even as it flickered, he opened himself and read it. Having learned it, he read the others, too.
“Master Harmodius has constructed a diagnostic. With help from Master Mortirmir, I sense. And now that he has completed it, he sends the finished working out even as he sends the blueprint of it to Master Mortirmir.”
Harmodius was framed in the doorway, looking tired but extremely pleased with himself. “You read all that from my little hermetical bees?” he asked. “You are coming along very well, boy.” He reached out, almost blind, and Blanche, ever thoughtful, pressed her own cup of wine into his hands. He drank the cup off, and Lady Natalia, unbidden, refreshed it.
Gabriel watched this and thought, What a company we have become. How closely all these are bound.
“I have always loved your oud, Payam, and I crave that you play again. Something old. And then I pray you all go to your beds and let me to mine,” Harmodius said.
The older man—much older than he appeared, as he was presently in the body of a late-middle-aged man with a pointy black beard and pepper-and-salt hair—drank off a second cup of wine as Payam tuned his strings carefully.
“Can you tell me of the Brogat?” Gabriel asked quietly. Blanche had moved, and he was hip to hip with Harmodius.
The older man finished his wine. “It is bad,” he said. “We do not have control of it, and people have been dying south of the river for two or three days.”
Gabriel had expected very different news, and this was like a punch in the gut. “And the army?” Gabriel asked.
“Racing for supplies, and too deep in the Adnacrags,” Harmodius said. “As I said to the queen, we must save the army first. I’m sorry for the callousness of this, but the loss of a hundred knights...anyway, I am drained now. But tomorrow, I will walk the Wyrm’s way. And do what I can.”
“I will fly,” Gabriel said. “And see what I can carry in terms of food.”
Harmodius nodded. “That is well thought,” he said. “You see that this was all a trap,” the older man went on, as the oud played.
Gabriel looked away. “Yes,” he admitted.
“Ash didn’t care a damn whether his forces won or lost. He left the plagues—and there are at least two—to kill the survivors. All the survivors. This thing is as lethal to bogglins as it is to men.”
Gabriel found it difficult to breathe. “Sweet Christ...” he said. Religious imagery was creeping back into his conversation.
Harmodius nodded. “There is, in fact, an element of mercy. I have weighted the evidence. The army is so well protected—so many magisters, so much working, so many amulets—that in fact, the human plague has been held back, perhaps even lessened. Perhaps Mag’s shields...I don’t know. But Ash is not omnipotent, and he didn’t predict that effect, or that Mortirmir had already solved the horse plague.”
The old magister’s eyes were closing. Gabriel had direct experience of casting until he was virtually empty, and he knew exactly how Harmodius felt.
Gabriel stood and, without too much effort, picked up the magister and carried him like a bride into his room.
“Bless you, boy,” Harmodius murmured.
Gabriel put the older man on a bed and pulled two thick white blankets over him.
When he went back into the small hall, everyone was gone but Payam, who slipped past him into his room, and Blanche, who tossed her hair and looked uneasy.
Gabriel caught her hand. They walked up a few steps of the tightly wound tower stairs, and then she tugged at him until they were sitting.
He went to kiss her. She endured the kiss, but it was not very passionate. At least, at first. It grew with time into a much more rewarding kiss.
She broke away and laughed. “I have not been with you for two weeks,” she said. “My whole body is yearning for you.” She looked away. He felt her blush even in the three-quarters darkness, her cheek warm and close to his.
“I told Toby to have your things...”
“I told him to leave my things with the queen’s,” Blanche said. “I’ll not
Gabriel leaned back against the next step. “The queen is going south to Harndon, and I am going east,” he said slowly.
Blanche kissed him a little, by way of communicating something. And then said, “You are going east, where mayhap they will crown you emperor. That is what Rebecca Almspend says.”
Gabriel did not want to have this conversation just then. He had found the back of her neck, and his fingers were slipping to the neckline of her kirtle, and she was not making any effort at resistance.
There was more kissing.
“If you think you are going to make love to me with my spine pressed into a cold stone stair,” she said, and she giggled, “you are mistaken.”
Gabriel had, in fact, convinced himself that they were about to do just that, and he took a moment to master himself, and then he picked her up—and Blanche was not a small woman—and carried her up the rest of the steps.
Ho ho ho, said Ariosto inside his head. And I love her. Oh, I remember her. So beautiful. Bring her!
Gabriel shut the door on his griffon. There were some things he didn’t intend to share.
Blanche put her arms around his neck.
Gabriel entered his palace and winked at the image of Prudentia, and then examined the workings of his palace until he found the one he wanted, and then the wheels spun. It caused him a moment’s unease in the aethereal to think that he had used this same working to get close to Amicia, not so very long ago.
“Clementia, Pisces, Eustachios,” he said in the palace of his memory, and the statue of Prudentia moved like a pantomime to point at one sign and then another.
And the room moved.
The windows rotated silently above the signs of the zodiac, and the statues below the band of bronze rotated in the opposite direction until his three chosen signs were aligned opposite to the ironbound door. And he winked again at Prudentia, walked across the tiles of the twelve-sided room, and unlatched the door.
He opened it on a verdant olive grove drenched in a dense golden light—the dream memory of the perfect summer day in Morea. It was not always thus, on the far side of the door. A richly scented breeze blew in. It was not always this strong, his golden power, and he deflected some with the power of his will, batting it into a ball and shoving it like a handful of summer leaves into a hempen bag he imagined into being and hung from Prudentia’s outstretched arm. Against a rainy day when there was less gold. Despite the waves of lust—really, even love, as he could see clearly in his palace, or perhaps because of the love—he took a timeless moment to weave the dense gold into a shield, which he hung like a buckler from Prudentia’s lifeless hand. Her lips twitched in a smile.
The insistent golden haze stirred through his hair and then reached the aligned signs on the opposite wall and—
Gabriel carried Blanche in through the door to his apartments. Toby was stretched out on a pallet of straw, and Anne Woodstock lay in her own blanket, wrapped tight, but just touching him. Gabriel managed to put a foot between them without either noticing, and Master Julius, who was writing out the last copy of a dense list of orders, raised his head at a scent of perfume but saw nothing.
Gabriel passed the two pourpointers, who were having a hushed discussion of whether to build a frame. He left them to it, and passed them into his bedchamber.
Toby had left a candle lit on one of his military chests. His bed had been hung—that is, his bed had been set up, and a sort of tent of linen hung over it by a hook in the ceiling. Gabriel almost pulled the whole thing down trying to lay Blanche on the bed.
She laughed. “Oh no,” she said, and slipped out of his arms to the floor. She went to the casemented window and opened the shutters, and the full light of the moon fell in. It was a hot night—hotter outside than in the old stone.
Then she turned to him with a happy smile and began to unlace her kirtle.
He began to help her, and she to help him. The moonlight had its own magic. And he had not really seen her like this.
And then there was a soft knock at his door.
Blanche dove into the bed.
Gabriel cursed. His curse was sufficiently rich that a line of red fire began to move on the walls, and he had to recall it.
He managed to get to the door with his dirty shirt wrapped around his loins, and he opened it a crack.
Cull Pett stood in the sliver of moonlight, his light eyes sparkling in his dark skin.
“Excellent,” he said in his rich voice. “There is moonlight, and you are already naked.”
* * *
Of all the expectations Blanche might have had of the evening, becoming the nurse while a monster cut open her beloved was not one she’d ever imagined. But the irk knew she was there, and requested her most courteously, and Gabriel handed her kirtle in to the closed bed and she put it on with no linens underneath.
She wondered how the irk had come to the tower, but then, she wondered how Gabriel had passed all the people in his apartment, and she had a good idea as to the answer to both questions.
The irk unrolled a leather case full of tools and put a superb silver hand on one of the military trunks. She looked at it in wonder—she touched it with her hand and was shocked at its near-human warmth. It was not cold metal.
When the armourer was ready, Gabriel smiled at her.
“I have a notion,” he said. “Sit just here, take my good hand, and look into my eyes.”
She did as she was bid, aware that the irk had a keen-bladed knife that seemed to be made of stone; flint or jade, she thought. It had an alien, half-moon shape. His mouth had too many teeth; his skin was black, not the warm, rich brown-black of Payam but a colder, bluer black, and she felt a chill of fear.
She looked into Gabriel’s eyes...
She had never been inside his memory palace before.
“I should have tried this weeks ago,” he said. “In the hospital. Then we could have talked.”
“Oh,” she said, turning. She looked up at the cathedral ceiling, the stone moldings running like veins and arteries throughout the roof, the stained glass, the statues and the bronze and gold hermetical symbols.
“It is beautiful,” she said.
And she could feel the warmth of his pleasure as a physical reaction.
He took her hand. “Have you ever worked ops?” he asked. “You see everything here. I can feel your power—a steady flame. Fascinating.”
He turned to her, and she, without thinking, kissed him, as if they were in the real.
As her tongue reached to find his through open lips, she had the strangest feeling of falling, and for a moment—
She didn’t know whether she was Gabriel or Blanche.
She broke the kiss in startlement and fell back into being herself.
Gabriel grinned. “My, my,” he said. “The things Prudentia didn’t teach me.”
His smile was erased, and he flickered. And then grew solid.
“I’m going to guess that my armourer has begun work,” he said.
Blanche pressed his hand, and kissed him again. But this time, as she kissed him, she felt a distant pain in her left hand and arm—a ringing pain, the aftershock of something worse.
“It is as if I am you,” she said.
“I wonder how long this metaphor would last?” Gabriel said playfully. His aethereal fingers brushed her neck and shoulders suggestively, and she laughed.
“But I’m afraid I would awake and not know how to do the queen’s laundry,” Gabriel said. “And there you’d be, trying to fight bogglins with a clean shirt.”
“Oh,” she said in mock anger. “So you think my work is beneath you.”
His face split in a grin, and she rolled her eyes. “Don’t, for the love of God, play at being some hopeless castle boy with his double entendres,” she snapped.
“I didn’t say it!” he replied, all mock contrition, and then his face spasmed again and she held him tightly.
When he was calm and solid, he sat her down.
“I want to return to the conversation on the stairs,” he said.
She smiled impishly. “Yes,” she laughed. “If I had known what awaited in the bedchamber, I might have stayed on the stairs.”
“Hush,” he said. “Lady Almspend is right, and it is only fair, you know. I hope to be chosen as emperor.”
“The queen is against it,” Blanche said. “I’m sure you know.”
Gabriel nodded. “I know. It will create a tangle of loyalties for all of us. You included. Me included.” He shrugged. “It is hard to explain to you, my love—”
“Your love?” Blanche asked. “Tell me truly? I am your love?” She leaned close. “You do not need to say such a thing. I know you, Gabriel. I know you like me. But love?”
He paused.
She smiled.
“Are you always this blunt?” Gabriel asked.
Blanche shrugged. “This is new territory, Ser Knight. I’m sitting, next to naked, inside the head of a man enduring an operation, speaking of whether he’ll be crowned emperor and how this may affect my life.” She shrugged. “This hasn’t happened to me before. I have to come up with new doctrines.”
Gabriel leaned back. “I’m fairly certain that I love you,” he said.
Her head snapped back as if she’d been struck. “Really?” she asked. “Why?”
She watched him a moment, enjoying his discomfiture. “My understanding,” she said, “is that becoming emperor includes marrying Irene.”
Gabriel nodded. “Leaving aside that she’s tried to kill me at least once, yes, marrying her would ease the whole transaction. Good God, are we always going to be this honest?”
Blanche was surprised at herself. His ready admission didn’t put ice in her belly. “Will you marry her?” she asked.