Havemercy (48 page)

Maybe he was also realizing what it meant to be standing with us when th’Esar had marked him out real private as his own spy. That part of my plan, at least, had gone over without a hitch. It was easy to see what side the professor was really on, and whatever satisfaction I felt over it was just because I’d planned things exactly that way.

“We had hoped that it would not come to this,” said th’Esar, neither acknowledging nor discounting what the professor had said. I thought he might faint with relief, but he went on standing. He was stubborn like that. “The corps is our best hope in the war to come, and with the magicians—disabled, as it were—perhaps the corps is our only hope.”

Big fucking surprise there, I thought, but I only sneered a little.

“Your Majesty,” Adamo started again, real placating like. “I’m afraid I don’t understand what sort of a help we can be with things going wrong the way they are all over.”

Th’Esar lifted his head, serene as you please, like he hadn’t spent the last months lying to us, like we wouldn’t have all got killed for no proper reason if we’d been a bit unluckier and not so good at our jobs.

“We are greatly in need of time,” he said. “Time to figure out what we can do to counteract this ailment, that we might beat our enemies across the border for good.”

“You want us to keep them occupied,” said Adamo, and it wasn’t a question so much as something he’d only just figured out.

“Yes, Chief Sergeant. That is exactly what we are asking of you.”

“Flying our dragons the way they are now,” said Adamo, careful and clear, “is simple madness. If it isn’t suicide yet, it soon will be.” He left out the part I knew he wanted to add: that it was something th’Esar couldn’t ask us to do, ’cause nothing got a man riled up like telling him what he couldn’t do, and Adamo knew it. There was no sense in provoking him—he was a man already on the edge of something too big for him to handle and something he had to handle nonetheless.

Much as I hated th’Esar right then, I didn’t fancy being in his boots, either, and not just ’cause of the color of them.

“Your Majesty,” Jeannot spoke up, stepping past Ace and Ghislain and making his way to the front to stand by me, “allow me to presume so much as to see if I am completely clear as to your royal plan.”

There was something snide in the way he said it, but it was perfectly politic. Jeannot was fucking clever, make no mistake. Th’Esar nodded and waved his hand in a gesture that seemed to indicate he was done wasting words on us and just wanted us to get all our cards on the table at once. Maybe then he’d sweep us from underneath. Maybe not.

“The reason we weren’t informed of the present situation was that we would continue to keep the Ke-Han busy at the pass,” Jeannot explained, neat and simple as you’d like, “during which period the corps could buy vital time for some . . . cure to be discovered.”

Th’Esar’s mouth went a little white and his cheeks a little red, since his complexion was the sort that betrayed too much emotion—not enough of the old Ramanthe in him any way you cut it. “In a manner of speaking,” he said at length, “that was indeed our plan. We hope, Airman Jeannot, that you are not insinuating your displeasure for this plan?”

“I hope I’m not insinuating anything at all, Your Majesty,” Jeannot replied, and melted back into the crowd, having made his point loud and clear enough even for the deaf, dumb, and blind.

We were all silent for a while, mulling that one over, since it was pretty obvious to all of us by now that we’d been used as bait, flying targets, a forlorn fucking hope they called it in romans or in melodramatic theatre, and I was so mad right then seven shades of red had come down over my eyes. It was only the professor’s fingers digging into my elbow that kept me locked into place, and even that wasn’t going to be enough real soon.

“I take it that no cure has yet been found,” the tagalong suddenly said. We all must’ve forgotten he was even there because suddenly everyone in the room was looking at him, even me, and we could all see clear as day that he was crying.

“The illness is a peculiar one,” th’Esar said, not out of pity for him, just stating the facts. “It seems to have affected first and most seriously those of purest Talent, and has worked onward from there to those with Talents more and more diluted.”

“So basically,” I said, “for the first time, you’re lucky if you’re a mutt.”

The left corner of th’Esar’s mouth twisted, sort of like a mirroring of my own sneer. “I suppose that is one way of phrasing it,” he conceded at last.

“Your Majesty will beg my pardon,” Adamo said, in a voice that didn’t sound as how that was what he wanted th’Esar to be begging for in particular. “But I can’t let my men fly under such circumstances. At this point—with the rate of deterioration—flying any one of the dragons out to the Cobalts and back would be enough of a risk, much less trying to use them for battle.”

“We have no other recourse,” th’Esar replied.

“Then we’re going to be overrun by the Ke-Han,” Adamo said, squaring his jaw. “Without anything but the Cobalts standing between us and them.”

Now there was real trouble. To be honest? I thought th’Esar was going to sentence Adamo to death right away, and his face turned purple like a dragon’d set his head on fire. It was ludicrous enough to be funny, only there wasn’t a single man jack of us who could see their way around to laughing—not even Compagnon. We weren’t the only poor fucks who were screwed seven ways, both up and down. Everyone in Volstov was going to be smoking opium and having twelve wives pretty soon, that is if the Ke-Han didn’t just decide to fucking kill us all. It was only a matter of time—which was why th’Esar’d been so careful with it—before the Ke-Han rode on over here across the plains and took what they’d been wanting since it had belonged to the Ramanthines, because we didn’t have a way to defend it.

It was a sobering thought. It made a man feel helpless, and if there was one thing I hated more than anything else, it was knowing someone’d tied my hands behind my back. But no matter which way I turned the problem to the light, I couldn’t see my way clear toward solving it. The whole thing blew like a Hapenny whore.

“Are you refusing to do your duty, Chief Sergeant Adamo?” th’Esar asked.

Adamo didn’t back down for even a second. “The way I see my duty, Your Majesty, is this,” he said. “We signed up to die for our country. In the past, some of us have done exactly that. But part of our code is to protect our dragons before anything else—and if we fly them as you wish us to, there’s no doubt in my mind that they will be destroyed. If that’s what you’re thinking is best for our country—to let them fall into the Ke-Han’s hands, to let the Ke-Han have at what they want so badly—then I’m ready, as a soldier and as a man loyal to my country, to hear your reasoning.”

Th’Esar made another one of those bird-wing motions with his hands. “We are working tirelessly even now to find a cure for the illness,” he said. “Yet we must have time to think—to incorporate into our actions this troubling new knowledge you have brought before us. It changes a great many things.” Adamo nodded once, curt, like the fucking perfect soldier he was. “We will call for you this evening, once we have considered the evidence before us, and, hopefully, have come to an arrangement that is more agreeable for all of us. But understand this, Chief Sergeant Adamo—if I say that the dragons must be sacrificed, then they must be sacrificed.”

There was this terrible silence, and I felt it deep down as my bones and blood and even further. Right then, if I’d been allowed to keep my knives on me before stepping foot inside the palace, I would’ve split His Majesty apart before he had a chance to spew out platitudes and horseshit as fucked up as all that. He might’ve paid for her, but Have was mine, and I’d’ve staked my life on how the other boys felt pretty damn close to the way I did.

Adamo just nodded; and then he bowed, stiff and formal, like we’d all been dismissed without us noticing, and turned to leave.

“Your Majesty,” the professor said, clearing his throat, and I had to give him points for how brave he was—even though it didn’t matter much for how stupid he was at the same time as that. “There is one other matter, if I may presume to address it.”

Th’Esar lifted an eyebrow. “You’ve presumed many things today,” he said, leaning forward in his chair. Then, against all fucking odds, he nodded. “Be quick. Our time is quite precious, as you are well aware.”

The professor swallowed and came forward. “As for the situation with the magicians being kept in confinement at the Basquiat,” he said, “since this young apprentice has already learned of this private matter—and as the reason for the magicians’ confinement is not, in fact, due to the quarantine of disease but rather to prevent the spread of panic alone—then I should think there is little reason at present for this young man to be kept from his mentor. It may also prove somewhat useful—though of course Your Highness is far better versed in these matters than I could ever hope to be—to allow a fresh young mind to work on the problem in tandem with a man I believe to be one of Your Majesty’s most talented magicians.”

“The Margrave Royston,” th’Esar said. He obviously thought it was worse than being bled to death, being given a good idea he hadn’t thought of himself, but he wasn’t a fool, and I could see right away he liked it. “Very well,” he said after a long pause. “The young man shall be taken to the Basquiat. The rest of you, however, must return to the Airman and await our summons.”

Things happened after that sort of all at once: Adamo barking out orders, and the tagalong thanking the professor as though he was some kind of saint or something, and then there were servants being let in, some to show us out and the rest, I figured, there to show the tagalong the secret way of getting inside the Basquiat. I almost wanted to go with him, to get some answer about how to fix Have, but that wouldn’t’ve done anyone a lick of good. Besides that, I was too busy watching the strange look that came over the professor and made him glow all over, almost like he’d stepped into a shaft of sunlight—only we were deep inside the palace, and so he couldn’t have done.

I guess it must have been pride or maybe even happiness, but in any case it wasn’t the sort of expression I’d ever seen the professor wear before that minute. Not during all his time at the Airman. Not even once.

ROYSTON

I didn’t know how long I’d been there, but at least I did recognize where I was: inside the Basquiat, her golden dome arced and splendid above me, and I wasn’t alone. All around me were the refugees of the epidemic—faces I recognized and faces I did not, all in various stages of misery.

At times I was worse than others, but during periods when my fever was less pronounced, I could piece together something of what I’d been told and what I’d come to understand on my own. Somehow—and even suffering as I was, I knew this was the key—the Well had been poisoned. We were all afflicted by it, every last one of us, from those with the purest Talent in their veins to the most bastardized; from Berhane and Daguerre and even Caius himself to Amer from the Bacque, who dealt in tricks and potions (all performed for a fee) at the farthest end of the Crescents.

It was something akin to a nightmare.

Such a disease was unprecedented. It undid us from the inside out, working first at the core of our Talents, until we could no longer hear the sound of it in our own bodies. Then, as Talent and blood were bound so inextricably together, it began to work as any disease on what held us together as men and women, raging through us as swiftly as any plague that had ever struck at the heart of the city.

During my stay—however long it was—I know that there were some who died, though when I asked who they were, no one would answer me.

I had to leave; I had to be somewhere quiet, where the punctuation of Daguerre’s moans would no longer shatter my thoughts like so much glass, and I could think this through to the end. There was something we were all missing—I refused to die—but Daguerre was always moaning, and Marcelline weeping against her pillow, and there were two young girls who curled together and shook so violently that their cot rattled against the marble floor. Because we were underneath the golden dome, everything was louder than it would have been in another room—louder and more pronounced, every noise we made echoing across this grand triumph of architecture above us. I could no more think than I could stand.

I tried to devise a system of counting the hours, counting the days—I tried to ask an attendant how long it had been since I was brought to this place—but for all I knew it could have been minutes or it could have been weeks. Time had become interminable, untrustworthy. I thought I would go mad.

And then Hal came to me.

At first I thought I was imagining things, hallucinating his face above my bed. It could have been the fever reaching an advanced stage, the signal that my end was nearer than I wished to admit. But when he sat upon the edge of my cot, it shifted, and his hands were cool upon my brow, his fingers brushing through my hair.

“Hal,” I said.

His eyes were red, as though he’d been crying. “They aren’t letting anyone in,” he said, soft and close as though it had been a year, and not weeks or days at all.

If I’d been able, I would have got up immediately to find out who was in charge that I might dispense with them in an appropriate fashion. Whatever the Esar was thinking, it was madness to hold us all here in one place without any indication as to when this policy would cease. Surely it was recipe for a riot. I couldn’t imagine what the Esar thought he would accomplish by handling things in this fashion.

I fought to sit up. My motor skills were infuriatingly limited, but Hal had been crying. “It isn’t as bad as it may seem,” I said, which apparently was not at all the right thing to say, for as soon as I spoke, Hal’s shaky composure crumbled as swiftly as the blue rock of the Cobalts and he buried his face, wet with weeping, against my neck. His nose was very cold. “Hal,” I said again, whereupon he made a high, keening sound in the back of his throat, like someone at the very end of his resolve. I put my arms about him instead and said nothing at all. I wished then that I’d not been so unrelentingly stubborn as to set what rules I had made for us in the carriage. There were so many opportunities lost to us, the awkwardness of the night after the ball, when Hal had started up the stairs to the bedroom after me, and countless days when I found my favorite chair made just a little too small by Hal’s joining me in it.