The Gospel According to Verdu (a Steampunk Novel) (The Brofman Series) (31 page)

The emperor started throwing things: books and lamps from the low tables around the room, cushions and, finally, one of his own shoes. Verdu laughed. “This is what the hand of the One True God has to smite with? I remain unimpressed.”

The surreal nature of the moment was cut short as the emperor arched backward and brought his hand over his heart. He pitched his head at an unnatural angle, his mouth open in a silent scream of pain. The skin on his face went from a flushed red to a violent purple, and finally a rush of air spilled from his lungs as he collapsed on the floor, coughing and moaning, his arm stretched into a claw of agony over his chest. “Go!” the emperor growled. “Be . . .
gone
!” he screamed. Attendants rushed to his side, all trying to help their master at once. Verdu, confused about what was happening, stood dumbfounded until Bateem appeared at his side.

“Oh,” Verdu said sarcastically, “I was worried that I goaded him into a heart attack. Glad to hear that it is divine intervention.”

“A difference without a distinction, sir,” Bateem said with full seriousness.

“Does this happen often? This spell?” Verdu asked.

“Rather more often of late.” Bateem, still rushing back down the corridors of the palace, leaned toward Verdu confidentially. “His father died after a series of fits; two of his uncles, too.”

Verdu shrugged. “I really could have goaded him to death.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t do that, Highness. You are not in direct line to succeed him, and that would be a shame. You need to be positioned just right before the emperor leaves his throne.” Bateem spoke as if Verdu were planning to orchestrate a game of musical chairs, not multiple assassinations. Verdu had to hand it to the little guy, he had a head for survival and intrigue.

“The devil you know, I guess,” Verdu said, realizing he didn’t know his particular devils very well at all.

The
Tao-Tallis
made port after dark. With the patrol boats that had been guarding this tiny harbor out of commission, the ship had no trouble as it approached to dock. Officials on the pier, thinly manned in the middle of the night, figured that if the patrols let the ship pass, it must be to the good. Chenda was pleased she did not have to spill any blood, but she still had a job to do. She could let nothing stop her.

She had memorized the maps Ollim and Rainor had of the area. The route was fairly direct. All she needed was to find a way that was faster than walking.

The sun-bleached boards of the pier glowed in the pale moonlight. Chenda followed Ollim from the dock onto the sand-and-pebble streets of the small port town. There was no one around. Given the late hour, she thought she would be exhausted, but she felt nothing. Her months of dreamless, restless sleep left her emotions stunted. She wished she could feel exhaustion, hatred, or even fear, but there was nothing but resolve, and the hope that finding her love and her companions would give her something that was missing inside her.

On the outside, she looked just as she had when she left the empire more than four months earlier. Her skin was tinged with half-healed bruises, her hair had not grown at all, her hopes for having a child with Fenimore had frozen. Despite the adventure of the last several days, she could not help but feel that the days of her life were becoming harder and harder to differentiate. One was much like the next. She wanted her life to hold surprises again.

Ollim softly whistled through his teeth, and she followed the sound to him. “Mode of transportation,” he said, waving his hand at the strangest contraption she had ever seen. At first glance she might have called it a tricycle, but the scale of it was huge and, judging by the orientation of the two seats, the matched pair of wheels was the front. In place of handlebars, there was a long rod parallel to the ground, with a ball on each end and a vertical pole rising from the middle of it. The pole was wadded with fabric. “Will you join me on this Giftwind, Pramuc?”

Ollim’s expression turned to one of shock, the glowing moonlight glinting off his mouth, which was stretched into a horrified O. “Pramuc! We do not steal! We are Mae-Lyn! We buy and sell.” He broke the chain that attached the Giftwind to the sheltering wall and pushed it to what could only generously be called a street. He left behind in the contraption’s place a sack filled with coins.

“We go now.”

Chenda shook her head and gave a mirthless chuckle. “So the Giftwind was for sale, whether the owner wanted to sell it or not?”

“Oh, we Mae-Lyn know. Everything is for sale if the price is right. I have given thrice what this gadget is worth. We will have inconvenienced the owner, but we have more than paid him for his troubles. It hurts me to the quick to overpay, but as we have little time to wait for the sun to rise and the owner to appear, I cannot have the satisfaction of driving the harder bargain and getting the better end of the deal; I regrettably pay too much.” He looked with forlorn eyes at the bulging bag of coins and then pushed the Giftwind to the edge of town. Nothing hurt a Mae-Lyn like paying too much.

Chenda sat where Ollim indicated on the seat between the two front wheels, and he climbed onto the higher seat behind her, positioned over the single back wheel. With a soft pop the bundle of fabric over on the vertical pole bloomed open into a large cone, which looked rather like a sideways umbrella. As it filled with air, the Giftwind rolled forward and picked up speed. Ollim attached a rope to the two knobs on the oversized handlebars and leaned back, using his own weight to counterbalance the pull of the ocean wind on the cone. With each pull of his arms, the cone caught more air, and the pair moved faster into the moonlit night. Each gust pushed Chenda toward the heart of the empire. Toward her captive companions. Toward Fenimore.

chapter 19

Zenith

The execution was the event of the season. At least that was what the emperor wanted the people to believe. A celebration atmosphere filled the marketplace: children were given tiny flags on sticks, bunting dripped from the highest walls, and visitors were treated to the finest of distractions, including dancing monkeys, fire eaters, and baskets of free moss bread and imported bananas. Capping it all off were well-planned spontaneous eruptions of cheers and songs praising the life and rule of the emperor.

The mood may have been jubilant on the surface, but the emperor’s men stood vigilant. The nerves of the soldiers were stretched taut. Every person entering the marketplace was checked three times for weapons as they came through the tunnels leading through the thick walls. The guards, armed with ceremonial poleaxes that glinted in the bright sunlight of the Tugrulian afternoon, were scattered thickly around the perimeter of the marketplace, while a select few others circulated though the ever deepening crowd.

Fenimore and Ahy-Me, wrapped head to toe in swathes of gauzy Tugrulian fabrics of various bright colors, stood on opposite sides of the marketplace, biding their time. Scattered throughout the square were a dozen other members of the resistance, handpicked by Pranav Erato for their bravery and strength. Each one of them knew that this would likely be their last day of life, and yet they stood resolute.

Fenimore’s eyes often flicked to Ahy-Me. It had become something of a nervous tic for him. Each time a soldier passed into his field of vision he tensed for a fight—a reaction he knew would draw attention to him and his companions. So he forced himself to glance at her, using their connection to calm himself, to remember who he was and the job he was there to do. The anticipation made the afternoon drag on and on.

Fenimore scratched at his many layers of clothing. He was broiling under the blazing sun. He circled around to a table groaning with baskets of food and mugs of cool water. He drank deeply and dropped the mug back onto the table, grunting noncommittally to the chattering women working to refill the cups.

He hated waiting.

Across the marketplace, Ahy-Me shared his impatience. When Pranav Erato had explained his wild plan to them, Fenimore and Ahy-Me stared in blank disbelief. It was a terrible plan, but it still outshone any other idea they had come up with. Dozens of things would have to fall into place for it to succeed, and the odds were very long. Looking around the dense crowd and observing all the guards in the square, Ahy-Me knew the pranav was right. There was no way that they were going to fight their way out. She watched the little children in the square and wondered, as they played with their tiny flags and greedily munched on the extraordinary treat of fresh bananas,
Who brings a child to a beheading?

A burly man dressed all in black mounted the platform carrying a heavy ax and a freshly sharpened pike. He dropped the blunt end of the pike through a hole drilled into the back of the platform. The point stabbed upward into the sky, waiting for the featured event of the afternoon and Professor Candice Mortimer’s head.

He placed one foot up on the stained execution block and rested the handle of the huge ax across his knee. There were a few cheers from the crowd, and he bobbed his head in acknowledgment. Producing a whetstone from the folds of his robes, the executioner began to sharpen the blade. The rhythm of the strokes and the building anticipation brought the crowd to an almost hypnotized state; all eyes were on the platform now, and all tongues hushed.

A line of guards positioned shoulder to shoulder at the side of the platform took two steps forward, creating an alley between them and the wall of the palace. Down the newly opened channel marched three more guards, dressed in black, followed by a squat official with a pinched expression.

Next in the parade came Candice, and much of the crowd gasped in disappointment. Her days in captivity had not been kind. Her blond hair, exotic and rare in the Tugrulian Empire, was darkly matted with dirt and oil. Her thin frame, so tiny to begin with, seemed even smaller, as if the guards had not bothered to feed her at all. Her lips were dry and cracked, and she hid her eyes from the sun. The bright light after a week in darkness stabbed at her, and highlighted her ill treatment: every tear in her clothes, rat bite on her hands, and bruise on her sallow skin was clear to see in the light of day. Her brokenhearted shuffle was the saddest part of all. She came to the platform steps and stopped, her shackled ankles bound too tightly to allow her to ascend.

The guard trailing Candice gave her a forceful shove, sending her sprawling onto the steps, her head resting on the platform. The executioner growled a reprimand to the guard and leaned over to snatch Candice by the back of her grubby shirt with one hand. In a powerful yet graceful twist of his torso, he swung Candice’s rag-doll form to rest, on her knees, behind the chopping block. Candice struggled to regain the breath that had been knocked out of her.

Until that moment, Ahy-Me had feared that Candice’s body and mind were too shocked and abused to participate in her own liberation, but the knock to the ground showed the spark still within her. For a moment, Candice glared at the axman. It was a subtle partial closing of just her left eye—a micro movement that many a student at Kite’s Republic University quickly learned to interpret as
duck and cover
. The look was there, and then it was gone.

Candice was alive again behind her eyes, but no one except her friends would have seen any difference. The crowd only saw a tiny, docile woman sagging behind the executioner’s block, a puppy about to be kicked. Little did they know that this pup was not going out without putting a few tooth marks into the kicker.

Ahy-Me and Fenimore positioned themselves at opposite corners of the platform. Various other members of the resistance gathered around closely, with the rest of the pressing crowd.

The bureaucratic man had mounted the platform and began to speak. He gestured widely at the assembled crowd and pointed at Candice as he looked down his nose at her. Fenimore did not need to understand Tugrulian to know what was being said: bad things are happening and it is
all—her—fault
.

Fenimore shifted his weight, wondering when the official would stop blathering. He was tired of waiting; the anticipation was killing him. He glanced toward Ahy-Me and saw her shaking and taking a step back. Something the official said had frightened her to her core.

Down the aisle created by the guards strode Verdu. He smiled and waved at the crowd as he mounted the steps to the platform. He proudly put his hands on his hips, and the assembled masses mumbled among themselves. Candice looked at Verdu in shocked amazement. Verdu turned to face her, but his expression was not that of a man who was there to champion her cause. He reached an open palm out to the ever chattering official, who obliged Verdu with a sizable key. Verdu unlocked the link that kept Candice’s hands together before her and looped the dangling chain around the front of the executioner’s block.

Fenimore could hear Candice’s pleas as Verdu worked. “Help me! Please! For the gods’ sake, Verdu, look at me! What’s the matter with you? Help me! Help—” Her voice was cut off by Verdu pushing her hard against the back of her head, forcing her torso onto the block.

“I have seen the error of my ways,” was all Fenimore could hear Verdu say.