The Crooked Key, Chapter 18: The Key Turns
The Crooked Key by Kyle Marquis
Chapter 18: The Key Turns
Nowan de Valc’s mollusk helmet had fallen off its perch. Eilo picked it up.
“Skaithness?” he asked.
“We won!” she said. He could imagine her smiling behind the blank mask. But then the silver mask opened, revealing a gaunt, gray face and stringy yellow hair. Veins stretched up toward her eyes, as if drawing nutrients out of her brain. Her eyes were the color of bad meat.
“Can you move?” Eilo asked, kneeling.
She managed to release Nowan de Valc. He floated face-down in the pool.
“That’s all,” she whispered. “That’s the end.”
The wind blew in a steady, pulsing ripple from where it had been freed, stirring her hair.
“What...what do we do?” the banisher said, his voice breaking.
“Well,” Skaithness said philosophically, “I suppose you could stick that mollusk helmet on my head and drag me and the key over to the pearl.”
“Could I...could I do that?” the banisher asked, looking at the huge pearl.
“No, I’m not attuned to the spiritual conditions of molluskdom like de Valc was. Also, I don’t want to be a clam god. Eilo, you have been a wonderful friend. I’m sorry that the age of the world won’t change yet, but I think you’ll be there when it happens. I think you’ll make the next age a good one.”
“What...what can I do? Please, Skaithness.”
She glanced at the golden boat.
“Just send me away,” she said. “Away from my poor palace that Nowan destroyed. Away from that evil pearl and helmet. Maybe I can still go, I don’t know, go somewhere. Help something, even if all that’s left of me is my armor. Maybe I can be someone’s answer. Maybe…”
She breathed out, and her eyes closed. The silver mask snapped shut.
“Skaithness?” the banisher said.
He waited for a long time, but she didn’t answer. He touched her blank silver face, looking for a way to open the mask. Then he remembered Aklurian trying all kinds of different ways to kill her, and laughed so hard he started to cry.
Even sore and tired, the banisher had no problem carrying her to the golden boat and placing her carefully inside. Then he went back to the tidal pool and found the crooked key. Forcing himself to think practically as a banisher, Eilo didn’t want the key, the pearl, and the helmet within a thousand miles of each other. So he placed the crooked key on Skaithness’s breastplate. A gentle push sent the golden boat into the water.
The wind from the trapped air still blew hard and steady. It carried the golden boat away, almost as fast as the river of blue light from the lighthouse had done.
The banisher desperately wanted to watch her until she disappeared over the horizon, but he could still feel the rumble of bombards through his boots. When he stood up and looked around, he saw an entire squad of Trezion’s Boys making their way down the slope, armed with swords and pikes.
Eilo picked up the Mollusk Knight’s shell mask and raised it so they could see. They froze. Then they went back up the slope and disappeared from view.
The death of Nowan de Valc did not turn the tide of battle on its own, though neither mortals nor monsters reacted well to the sight of a blood-smeared banisher striding across the battlefield with the dead sorcerer’s helmet in one hand and his glaive in the other.
The paralysis at the green ship certainly helped the defenders. This was, Eilo learned later, but a physical paralysis caused by the death of the one whose savage will fueled much of its operation, and political paralysis caused by the immediate infighting among the apprentices, demons, and military officers who represented the authority just below Nowan de Valc. When the two sea dragons turned on each other, each commanded by different factions, the ship tumbled into the water; its whereabouts are still unknown and it is generally assumed to have sunk shortly after the battle.
The ferocious defense of the castle that Ryphonia and her followers mounted also sapped morale from the mortal attackers, many of whom were mercenaries and who were paid well enough to fight, but not enough to die. When one company formally opened negotiations with Lord Halday to defect to Lady Ryphonia, the rest of the dead sorcerer’s mortal forces soon found excuses to leave the island.
Still, the monsters fought on. Eilo managed to get back over the walls, thanks to Ryphonia’s quick thinking with a rope, but they were eventually forced to yield the main gate. Lord Halday and the remaining cavalry officers died in the chaotic retreat into the donjon.
But the old pirate castle was cunningly made, and the leaderless sea horrors had little sense of tactics. Even as they swarmed over the walls and smashed down gates, Eilo and Ryphonia pinned them in killing zone after killing zone. Only the lack of suitable weapons—no horn swords like the hexguards wielded, and only so many wooden arrows or hastily sharpened pikes—threatened to doom the beleaguered defenders.
The banisher soon realized that he could do nothing on the front lines except die gloriously. He retreated to the apothecary shop and, with the help of the castle’s surviving apothecary, a midwife, and two cooks, brewed up enough banisher’s wine that every one of the surviving defenders could coat their swords or spears.
By then, half the defenders were dead, not even counting the sailors and officers killed on the open sea, but the banisher’s wine turned the tide. As the sun set, the battle went from a lost cause to likely victory, and then from likely victory to a grim mopping-up: the kind of bug hunt that banishers specialized in. Eilo led teams of Ryphonia’s best knights through the castle all night, and well into the morning. There was no glory in that, only killing: two men up front and two along each side with shields, and everything else with pikes or crossbows, moving in frog-hops or in lockstep to destroy every last lobster man, crab woman, slug, or walking octopus.
It was all over by midmorning, and Eilo had never felt so tired. He wanted to help in the infirmary, but Ryphonia ordered him to rest. He collapsed in an empty room—there were so many empty rooms now—and slept off and on until sunset.
By then, the worst of the medical work was over, and he could receive treatment for his cuts, bruises, and the rib the handgonne had broken.
The survivors had only two galleys, both taken in the fighting. One remained in the bay, while the other patrolled around the island. When the galley hurriedly rowed back a few days later, they learned that an emissary from Baristoc’s civilian government would arrive soon, bolstered by dignitaries from the Ovarch of Eime.
There was no time to clean the blood off the floors, but Ryphonia greeted them with as much ceremony as anyone could manage with two broken fingers and a sprained ankle. The civilian, an emissary from the mayor of the South City, politely but firmly informed Ryphonia that, after the death of Duke Ulcan, the merchant guilds and free workers had declared Baristoc a free city: legally still a part of the Emmer Duchies, and of the religious-political order that the Ovarch represented, but no longer belonging to any one duke or duchess, or to all of them collectively.
The bishop sent by the Ovarch reluctantly confirmed the agreement that Eime had reached with Baristoc, which—due to the Ovarch’s official seal—was no longer subject to legal suit or relitigation.
The almost-duchess still retained her previous legal holdings outside of Baristoc, including—the mayor was quick to assure her—her family’s hereditary estate, Castle Yanegast. But the capital could no longer be hers, or anyone’s.
“At least,” the bishop said, as they often did, “in this age and configuration of the world.”
The banisher’s laughter was probably inappropriate, but he did not care.
You are probably familiar with how the situation in Baristoc came about, so I will not repeat the well-known chronology. I will say that in those early days of the Restructuring, the martyrdom of two wealthy and well-respected second-class citizens (Fylent Maer, a member of the First Clans, murdered by agents of the Trusted Seven, and Manahath Bewou, a foreigner murdered by nativist gangs), had more influence on public opinion than even the Massacre of the Alewives. The revolution that had been building among the serfs ever since the Bantish wheat blight would not blossom fully until that spring; it was the unification of working artisans with wealthy merchants (who feared the murdered of Fylent Maer and Manahath Bewou more than they feared the urban mobs) that brought an end to the Duchy of Baristoc. And all of this, of course, was years before the Clan House Act liberated the serfs and ended the impositions on the First Clans.
After the “banquet of the free citizens,” as it was later called, Eilo finally remembered the pearl. The first thing he did then was take Nowan de Valc’s mollusk helmet to a blacksmith and have it utterly destroyed. He watched them work until nothing remained. Then he and four porters returned to the beach and found the pearl where it had fallen. The dead sorcerer had moved a little, shifting with the tide, but he had not been swept out to sea. The banisher checked him for artifacts that might be spiritually or conventionally poisonous, but found nothing. He beheaded the corpse, waited for it to dry off a little, and ordered both halves burned. Then he had the porters carry the pearl back to Lady Ryphonia with instructions to keep the crooked key away from it, should the object ever return.
“I’m sorry about Skaithness,” the almost-duchess said later that morning as servants packed up her apartment. “She was right about me.”
“No,” the banisher said. “She was right to be angry, but she wasn’t right about you. People aren’t who they are forever. You’re not the person you were a week ago, are you?”
Ryphonia did not answer.
“Take this pearl to Castle Nysse and watch over it,” he said. “I can’t carry a five-foot-diameter ball around with me as I do my banishing.”
“Castle Nysse?” the duchess asked. “It’s a ruin!”
“Still more inhabitable than your castle,” the banisher said. “And at the risk of sounding cold-blooded, you might have the money to fix it up now. Think of all the soldiers you now don’t have to pay.”
“That is cold-blooded,” she said.
“Also,” the banisher said, “I trust you with the library.”
“The library?” Her eyes went to a packed chest that contained books from Castle Nysse.
“The one you never found when you were there, the one that survived the Ergot Duke’s attack and your snooping around and the collapse of the banishers. I’ve been back a few times since, to check certain information held there, but I’ve been so busy I haven’t had time to investigate how to end a rath-gorla haunting. I’m sure you can figure it out.”
He provided her with instructions to reach the secret library. She thanked him, then stepped forward as if she wanted to embrace him. He stepped away. He would help her, but he could not forget Duke Ulcan.
“A galley sails at midday, with the tides,” Rynne said. “I’ll be on it with those of my people who have remained loyal. Goodbye, Eilo. I wish I could have been...more than I am.”
This time he watched the ship until it disappeared over the horizon.
Eilo the Banisher returned to the capital with the bishop and the mayor’s deputy, as he had business there with Fylent Maer’s estate. He had, apparently, been named as his clanmate’s legal successor, which surprised him, even though it shouldn’t have. On the way back, the bishop—a jolly, casually corrupt fellow with gout and a love of perfume—kept the banisher entertained with stories of the hexguards’ fall from grace. They were by no means legally abolished, but the Ovarch had distanced himself from many of their operations after the broad-ranging calamity of the Mollusk Temple. Many places had suffered, not just Baristoc: as Eilo had feared, the servants of the green towers had assaulted several towns between the swamps outside Upper Bant and the ruined citadel of Old Rock.
The towers had all fallen after the Mollusk Knight’s death. The bishop said something complicated about the works of sorcery having no ontological inertia, unlike the slow but inescapably true work of the Egg. As they walked down the gangplank back in North City, the smell of the dock fire still barely detectable, the bishop encouraged Eilo to have his people “sort out” some of the new hunters who were starting to appear, and who were even worse than the hexguards.
As if Eilo had “people.”
But, approaching the old house a block from the docks where Fylent Maer had conducted his business, the banisher wondered if maybe he did. He had already received correspondence from some of his late clanmate’s employees, some of whom he had already met; and anyone willing to offer him tea and scones on short notice could not be all bad. Though he honestly did not want to see Ryphonia again, at least for a long time, he might be able to count on her academic skills and her patronage. Maybe he could even entice Panzu back, now that her knowledge no longer made her a target.
They had changed the locks, which was prudent. Though it was eight o’clock according to his new pocket watch, Eilo saw a light upstairs, so he knocked.
“Mr. Nysse,” Fylent Maer’s secretary said. That was how the banisher learned the new mode of address. “Please come in.”
The damage had all been cleaned up. New carpets covered the floors and the walls looked clean and white. The bodies were long gone. That was another thing that surprised Eilo even though it shouldn’t have. He spent several hours going through his late clanmate’s records and correspondence, discovering seven things that he placed in a folder called “pressing” and two that went into a folder labeled “potentially catastrophic.”
Fylent Maer had meticulously recorded the spread of witch covens, death cults, spiritually corrosive horrors, and other threats, as well as evidence of what he considered the likely order of the new age. But with only one banisher of Clan Nysse, and only a handful of any clan, anywhere, all the lawyer could do was file reports. Eilo started organizing those reports into plans of action.
The news about Ryphonia’s parents—of their sorcerous ambitions and other heresies—came out within a month, much earlier than anyone had anticipated. It made absolutely no difference and no one cared except a few hexguard-affiliated street preachers and broadsheet publicists, whom no one paid attention to anyway. Perhaps, Eilo mused when he learned of it, Panzu had been right about the political value of truth.
Baristoc was more peaceful than he had ever known it. That meant constant strikes, work stoppages, street fights, and gang wars, of course, but not nearly as many as he had seen in his childhood, visiting the city with his mentor. It was almost wholesome. Still, he could see it everywhere he looked: the turning of the wheel, the rise of the new age; gods waiting behind doors of blue light to be born, hungry and terrible, into this world. Old powers who felt death approaching, clinging to their empty thrones. Eilo could feel it. Half the people on the street could feel it, though they wouldn’t meet each other’s eyes when they thought about it.
The world would change.
*
Many miles from Baristoc, in a river mouth frozen in the depths of winter, a copper boat came to a stop. It bumped against frozen roots and scraped over ice, making enough racket that a few crows took flight, cawing angrily and dislodging the snow from a crooked pine. The snow, light and powdery, fell gently down over the boat and landed on a silver mask that depicted a beautiful and expressionless girl.
The snow clung to the face for a moment. Then it started to melt. It ran down the face like tears. The powder on the breastplate started to drip down in rivulets. Then it steamed. The steam swirled around the boat as the armor’s gauntlets moved, making alternating fists. The breastplate was the color of burnished gold and covered in swirling, abstract designs—all the designs except one. For, placed right over the breastbone, there was a crystalline design in the shape of a crooked key.
THE END