The Crooked Key, Chapter 13: Overheard at the Banquet
The Crooked Key by Kyle Marquis
Chapter 13: Overheard at the Banquet
Despite the famous saying, it is in fact entirely possible to argue with results. Unfortunately for Captain Aklurian, he was busy greeting the commodore of Lady Ryphonia’s fleet, who had just arrived in the bay, while Lord Halday told everyone that Eilo had defeated the carver-pigs. With the hexguards distracted, the victorious banisher got what he wanted: the castle steward freed Skaithness, sharpened and then returned Eilo’s glaive, and informed the banisher that he would receive an audience with Lady Ryphonia. Though it would not be a private audience, he would be allowed to attend the banquet to celebrate Commodore Jancel’s naval victory in the Bay of Marafer and successful flight to the island.
They received a room in the castle with a balcony from which Eilo could see the dock where they had arrived. Servants had hauled the copper boat out of the water and covered it with a tarp.
“What an odd time for a banquet,” Skaithness said. She moved almost as slowly as a normal person now, and had even begun to lose some of her flawless synthetic precision. Something was wrong with the armor, though it had once again repaired itself after being burned by slug-acid.
“The commodore came bearing supplies,” Eilo said, drying his hair after a much-needed bath. “Enough for a siege. A big meal will reassure Lady Ryphonia’s followers.”
“They’re going to need a lot of reassurance,” Skaithness said. “My gaoler said that the Trusted Seven has raised a fleet of twenty ships, and plans to attack the island.”
“But this is your island, right?” the banisher asked. He could see the woman’s shadow through the painted screen he stood behind. “Where is the crooked key?”
“I don’t know yet,” Skaithness said, “but I plan to use your method to find it.”
“My method?” Eilo asked. He inspected himself in the mirror of polished copper built into the wall. He looked a bit haunted, the skin around his dark eyes smudged with gray. His black hair was long enough to tie back, which he did.
“The way you taught me to follow those plookin trails,” the armored woman said. “Look at the dock where we arrived! I’ve seen other artifacts around the island that look like that, or like the lighthouse. For example, the cell next to mine had a wrought iron railing that looked familiar.”
“And I saw an iron spike on the platform above my cell,” Eilo mused. He donned a white wool shirt, then shrugged into a black silk jacket with silver chasing. “Though I don’t know if the people who created your armor and this island were, hm, ‘intuitive’ in exactly the same way I am.”
“Which is why I’m excited to attend this banquet,” Skaithness said. “We can ask people what they know and try to figure out if this island has some kind of center, or maybe some place that’s sealed or guarded.” The shadow Skaithness cast on Eilo’s dressing screen held up the finger she used to unlock doors.
“Skaithness, why are you getting slower?” he finally asked.
She sighed. Eilo peeked around the screen. Her face mask was open, and she looked as worn down as the banisher felt, her cheeks pale, her blue eyes bright as if with a slight fever. Curls of blonde hair spilled around her face.
“Do you know that certain insects are born without the ability to eat?” she said. “I studied this in my vault, and until now, I did not understand why my instruction-mechanisms emphasized this lesson. After all, I assumed I was being trained to rule a kingdom one day.” She shook her head. “But I think I’m like those insects. Some of them mate, or build a hive, or perform certain other industrious tasks. What they do is important for the next generation. But they are born with all the energy they will ever need to do what they have to do. And once they finish their work—or even if they can’t finish their work—soon enough they’re used up, and they die.”
“I don’t accept that,” the banisher said. “You’re not just some wind-up toy who’s marching toward a door so you can open it up and then fall over dead.”
“How do you know?” Skaithness asked.
“I reject the premise,” the banisher said. “What if you’re like those carver-pigs?”
“Oh Eilo, you sure know how to compliment a girl! At the banquet, try not to compare Lady Ryphonia to a carver-pig.”
“What I mean is: those poor animals mindlessly do something that no one needs anymore, and it’s been so long that they don’t even do it correctly. But you’re not mindless, Skaithness.” Eilo settled his long-suffering tricorn hat on his head. It was, at least, almost the same color as his black jacket, though he thought it had been gray once. “You don’t have to follow your instincts, and you don’t have to follow a destiny that was laid down centuries ago, and that might not even make sense anymore.”
He stepped out from behind the screen.
“Your tight little socks!” Skaithness cried.
“They’re hose,” Eilo said. “I wore them in Baristoc, too. They’re expected of a gentleman.”
“And the little shoes with buckles! Oh, it’s wonderful, Eilo. The bottom of you looks so tiny!”
This was, you may recall, the five years when puffy jackets reigned among the aristocracy and their imitators. Historians generally focus on the massive civil upheavals after the Massacre of the Alewives, but I, for one, remember the sartorial frenzy of the era, otherwise forgotten by historians desperate to concoct a fixed and unavoidable chain of events from the Bantish wheat blight to the Clan House Act.
The banisher interested himself more in the court sword he was permitted to wear, as he could not haul his glaive to a banquet. Skaithness, for her part, wore a silk skirt in Lady Ryphonia’s colors over her tassets and a mantle of feathers around her shoulders.
“If I have to dress like this to learn about the crooked key, fine,” the banisher said.
“We’ll learn about the key, and about how many enemies Nowan de Valc is sending our way,” the armored woman said.
The banquet was expected to last from early afternoon to late at night, with different groups breaking away at times for different events. Eilo usually worked hard to avoid these sorts of events, but he understood that Lady Ryphonia needed to impress her allies, especially with the Trusted Seven’s fleet bearing down on them. After all, if minor nobles like Lord Halday became desperate enough, they could just hand Lady Ryphonia’s head to the invasion force and escape punishment as collaborators.
At least, most of the nobles probably imagined they could negotiate with the Trusted Seven. The banisher suspected that the ordinary rules of civilized behavior (including a gentleman’s ability to betray a fellow aristocrat to escape punishment) might not apply if Nowan de Valc were among the invasion forces. According to Eilo’s subsequent commentary, he generally assumed that the Mollusk Knight was just another sorcerer with mad dreams of the age to come, and this opinion would color subsequent historians’ view of Nowan de Valc. And yet subsequent events around Shulian’s Pearl, including the Mollusk Knight’s own words, intimate that his motivations were more political than cosmic. I don’t wish to imply that I favor the revisionist position, which argues that Nowan de Valc was merely a political actor—an aristocratic reactionary with views largely identical to the reactionaries who would oppose the Restructuring in years to come. Among the many problems with linking Nowan de Valc with the coming reaction was that those reactionaries spoke constantly of the Restructuring's aesthetic failures: they were self-confessed aesthetes; poets and religious traditionalists. The Mollusk Knight showed none of those interests. On the other hand, to regard Nowan de Valc as a mere feudalist hardliner—to imagine that he negotiated with ancient mollusk gods in order to force a three percent tax increase on wheat-farming serfs in Lower Bant—turns him into a precursor of the later mercantilist conservatives. Exactly what motivated the Mollusk Knight may be permanently lost to history, a subject for endless, intermittently fruitful speculation.
But at the time, the banisher considered Nowan de Valc a dangerous zealot, and as he entered the banquet hall, that was what he planned to tell Lady Ryphonia at the first opportunity. Unfortunately, courtiers entirely surrounded her raised dais, so the banisher could not approach.
Nonetheless he could see her, and the moment he did, the banisher felt as if whole years of his life blew away. He was a little boy again, exploring Castle Nysse during that one summer that was, he now realized, the only happy year of his life there. He had been happy and carefree; had not known anything about Rynne’s desperate quest to banish the rath-gorla that infected Castle Yanegast.
That afternoon, Lady Ryphonia of Yanegast wore a dress of green velvet and a crescent-moon headdress in silver. Her chestnut hair fell down her back in shocking defiance of convention for a lady of noble rank. She still had freckles.
“Do you know that the castle has a ghost?” Skaithness said, appearing at his side and pulling the banisher out of his reverie.
“What?” he said. “Describe it.”
“I’ve been asking questions,” Skaithness said, “and people say that a big shimmering square, like a huge square sheet that blocks doors and windows, appears sometimes. It has a face, but no one knows whose ghost it is.”
“That’s not a ghost,” the banisher said, still distracted by the sight of Lady Ryphonia among her courtiers and war ministers. “That’s an architecton. Like guardian worms and dream turners, they were created as palace servitors by ancient magicians. Or tomb servitors, since those magicians were sometimes busy even after death. They help reshape corridors, blocking some entrances, opening others. I’d say it’s harmless, but hexguards are here. I’m surprised that the fear of the hexguards hasn’t turned it into a demon of despair yet. Maybe they don’t know about it.”
“Reshaping corridors?” Skaithness said. Maybe we need it to find the key! I’m going to ask more questions!”
“Don’t let the hexguards overhear you talking about a—”
But the armored woman had already disappeared back into the crowd.
This was not the most formal sort of noble banquet, but there was still a hierarchy and a system of movement that had to be acknowledged. The system grew more complicated as one moved away from the main doors, up the steps, toward the would-be duchess. Though Fylent Maer had technically trained the banisher to manage this sort of social event, it was all theoretical knowledge; Eilo felt as plodding and clumsy here as if he had asked Lord Halday to follow plookin trails over the rooftops. He ate a roasted sweet potato and contemplated how to ascend the dais.
By contrast, Skaithness moved through the banquet like the perfectly honed machine she was. The armored woman asked everyone she could about the nature of the island and whether anyone knew any strange ruins. Despite her fatigue, she had a bright smile and happily answered other people’s questions about her, establishing an easy back-and-forth rapport with some of the island’s most important military officers. She drank tea, ate cheese, and listened to their boring stories of heroic action, all the while interrogating them about the island and its history.
The banisher let her work, since he knew that their real goal was to stop the Mollusk Knight from finding the key and fixing his towers. He told himself that he did not really care about Baristoc’s borderline civil war; even if Nowan de Valc had declared himself a faction, Eilo thought that his support for the Trusted Seven’s political opponents was cynical pragmatism on his part, not a real political decision at all. A banisher could use political factions to oppose a sorcerer with political designs—his mentor had taught him that—but to get tangled up in factional disputes compromised the banishers’ mission.
And yet, the Trusted Seven had murdered Fylent Maer to bury the truth about Duke Uleino. The hexguards, agents of the Egg of Eime, had arranged Duke Uleino’s death to advance the Trusted Seven’s goals—and Nowan de Valc’s with them. And Lady Ryphonia—Rynne—was a friend. More than that, she was a friend that the banishers had failed. Could Eilo’s mentor, and Eilo, have acted faster, to protect her family from the ruthless ambitions of the hexguards?
Maybe his brooding about her drew Lady Ryphonia’s attention, because the banisher heard her voice.
“Eilo of Nysse,” she said. “Please, join me.”
He ascended nine copper steps draped in the skins of exotic animals to sit beside Rynne. Commodore Jacel, the sea captain he had met in Baristoc, clasped his hand. Then the commodore raised a crystal goblet and downed his wine in one gulp. A cupbearer poured the banisher a glass and Eilo took a sip.
“This is better than the de Valc I normally drink,” he said. Rynne smiled and the commodore laughed; he was very drunk.
“It’s been years, Eilo,” Lady Ryphonia said. She no longer bothered to affect a North City accent like at Castle Nysse; she sounded like an empress. “I should thank you for everything, starting with the pig slaughter, but I know that banishers don’t need praise.”
Eilo glanced at the commodore, but he had turned away to argue points of naval strategy with the cavalry officers.
“They’re talking like this is going to be an honest battle,” Ryphonia said, swirling her wine. “Fleet to fleet, maybe with some complications because we don’t know how well the new carracks will perform against the Trusted Seven’s galleys. But Nowan de Valc’s ship is with the fleet sailing out of Baristoc. A twisting shape of semitransparent green stone, they say, with arquebusiers on the forecastle and arbalests behind, pulled by sea-dragons. Commodore Jancel saw it with his own eyes.” She nodded to the drunk sea captain, who did not respond. “But he still acts as if this will be like any other battle.”
“We might have a way to fight the Mollusk Knight,” the banisher said. He pointed with his crystal goblet to Skaithness. The armored woman was talking to a pair of noble handmaidens and trying to make a gesture that signified “giant blue beam that cut a slug in half.”
“The woman Aklurian wants to drown?” Ryphonia said. “We’ve all noticed that her armor resembles some of the artifacts on this island. And the boat you came in, too.”
“How did you even find this place?” Eilo asked.
“I went back to Caste Nysse after…after my father died,” she said. “It was entirely a ruin by then, but I knew where the old man had locked up the library. And I still had the key. I was looking for answers to the rath-gorla and to certain other spiritual matters, but instead I found correspondence from the previous head of the banishers to a pirate captain who had abandoned the Ergot Duke and was trying to wrangle a pardon for him and his crew.” She nodded toward Commodore Jancel. “He told me how to find the island.”
The banisher told Rynne about their—apparently unnecessary—journey through the Wolf Tribe lands to the lighthouse at the Cape of Secret Stars. The noblewoman listened, fascinated.
“If there’s anything valuable on this island, the Ergot Duke probably carted it away years ago,” she said when he was done. “I think your metal friend is chasing a dream. I don’t have much faith anymore in people who think they can bring about a new age. I saw my parents try. I saw what happened to them.”
Captain Aklurian finally made his appearance. Both their eyes followed him across the banquet hall. The hexguard saw Eilo with Ryphonia and ground his teeth, then looked quickly away.
“Aklurian hanged an innocent man the other day,” Eilo said.
“I know,” Ryphonia said. “And I know he gloated to you about it. And about what he did to my parents, and what he still holds over me.”
The banisher fell silent, unsure of his old friend’s feelings. Finally he asked, “Why didn’t you tell me why you came to Castle Nysse?”
“Because you couldn’t have helped,” Rynne said. “No one could. Our mentor saw a spiritual struggle—a chance to banish a rath-gorla from an entire castle. He knew that the hexguards had executed my father and then covered it up, but he didn’t understand what they were really after. He didn’t know that all they really wanted was the wealth that my mother’s family possessed in trading and shipping rights. The banishers and my parents lived in a kind of dream, while the hexguards knew exactly what they wanted and what they were doing.”
“My last few years haven’t felt like a dream,” the banisher said. “They feel like the only real part of my life. Everything else has turned to smoke.”
“Our mentor spent too much time in that castle, just like my parents spent too much time in theirs,” Rynne said. “They became like hermits, disconnected from the world. My father was related to the Duke of Baristoc—that’s why I’m in this mess!—and, do you know, he never stepped foot in the city his whole life? No, they spent their time dreaming of the age to come. They collected wizard trinkets from the last configuration of the world. Toys that weren’t so different from the Egg of Eime.”
Lady Ryphonia chuckled, reveling in the audacious blasphemy, and tossed back the rest of her wine.
“That’s what we thought drew the hexguards, those ‘artifacts of sorcery,’” Rynne said. She laughed again, this time bitterly. “We had no idea that they just wanted money. Aklurian arranged my mother’s death, never quite making a formal accusation of heresy or sorcery, and shifted her holdings to the Church of Eime. When I found out what had happened, I grabbed a trunk full of books from Castle Nysse’s library and fled, but I was too late.”
“And now you let him serve you?” the banisher asked, incredulous.
“No, Eilo, you don’t understand,” Ryphonia said. “I serve him. There are men like Fylent Maer except they work for the hexguards: men who keep meticulous records on everything, waiting for that information to become useful. If Aklurian orders it—or if he fails to check in with his lawyer twice per year—that man will release the information about my parents and the rath-gorla. And I’ll be ruined. But since the remaining hexguards have to oppose Nowan de Valc since a group of them betrayed the Church and swore themselves to his service, we’re trapped together, in a way.”
“Disgusting,” Eilo said. “To bind you like that, like a hedge witch binding drippers. And you were still a child.”
“Even children can make choices,” Ryphonia said with sudden heat. She wiped her eyes, then said, “But my parents were always doomed. They were fascinated by the past and the future, but they were dilettantes. They never had the mad, savage will that even the feeblest hedge witch can manage. Without that focus, all those trinkets were worthless, or poisonous. Nowan de Valc has that focus of will. So does Aklurian, I think. And maybe that armored woman. But you, me, everyone else? No matter how much we want something, it’s not enough.”
“You’re right about Aklurian,” the banisher mused. He wanted to stay talking with Rynne, but an idea had formed in his mind. After a few more minutes of conversation, he politely disentangled himself from his old friend (not hard, as a dozen officers and nobles wanted an audience), and headed back down the steps toward Skaithness.
“Have you learned anything?” he asked.
The armored woman smiled.
“There’s a cave under the castle,” she said. “I think I can get us there, too.”
“Who knows about it?” he asked.
“Only me, I think,” she said. “Everyone else has bits of information, but not the whole picture, and they’re more worried about the Mollusk Knight’s fleet than anything else.
Eilo thought again of what Lady Ryphonia had said about the power of a focused will. Though Skaithness’s will seemed nearly depleted: despite her exuberance, her skin looked slack and gray as if she were badly dehydrated.
“Skaithness, how do you feel?” he asked, following her to the entrance to the room.
“Excited!” the armored woman said. “I’m going to go explore the cave.”
She turned and walked through the huge double doors of the banquet hall.
“Don’t—”
But it was too late. Skaithness disappeared out of the room, followed by a hundred curious eyes.
*