Chapter 8: To Hang an Elephant

Despite the occasional assassination, outbreak of banditry, or, of course, monster attack, the Emmer Duchies had been at peace for Eilo’s entire life. Duke Uleino had been just one of a score of dukes and duchesses who had ceased killing each other almost fifty years ago, after a popular uprising against their depredations led to various charters and treaties to curb their power. The violence of the Ergot Duke had been the only exception, and many scholars today now regard him as a kind of presentiment of Nowan de Valc and those who followed. Many dukes in those days were already mere figureheads. Duke Uleino had certainly been all but powerless except for his considerable wealth, but as Eilo rode through the streets of northern Baristoc that night on the horse of a dead High Guard, it seemed like people were willing to kill and die even for that meager prize.

Fires burned not just on the docks, but in one of the oldest all-wood slums in the heart of North City, which lay between Fylent Maer’s house and the Old Rock. The original heart of North City, built centuries ago to guard the settlement across the river from marauding barons, Old Rock’s convenient position between the Cathedral of the Egg and the Palace of Justice made it a natural meeting point for the Ovarch’s people (including the hexguards) and the ducal and magisterial governments. That’s where Skaithness would be. But Old Rock was a sprawling old castle, and Eilo had never been there before.

And simply getting there would not be easy. Mercenaries, civil guards, and street brawlers were fighting in the streets, stabbing each other with knives and swords, hurling rocks and torches. Rumors of the circumstances around Duke Uleino’s death had set off a political firestorm, and from what the banisher could gather, the fighting involved more than just the Trusted Seven fighting against the faction nominally loyal to Lady Ryphonia: various guilds, trade unions, and even scholastic factions were using the dispute to settle their own grievances with each other or with the city’s major power blocs.

On that first night, the fighting probably made no sense to anyone except a handful of agitators and political philosophers who had seen the crisis coming. To the banisher, the city was a conflagration of torch-wielding mobs and vicious guards, all eager to settle vendettas that had nothing to do with him. Mostly, he was relieved that none of Lady Ryphonia’s followers had attacked him so far. Though he had kept his hat, he now wore the heavy, scalloped coat of the street gang that had broken into Fylent Maer’s house, though he didn’t even know what they were called. His glaive, collapsed as far as it could be, hung from a strap on his back like an arquebus, while he wore the dagger and thrusting-sword of one of the dead men at his hips. Panzu, who now had nowhere else to go except into the thick of it, rode in a saddlebag and complained of seasickness.

“So, who is Trezion?” she asked, because they kept seeing Trezion’s Boys.

“I don’t know, but if I see him, I’m going to kill him,” Eilo said. “Shit, three of them are—hello there, friends! What news?”

He pulled up his dappled mare as three of Trezion’s Boys appeared around the corner.

“News is it’s a fucking mess,” the lead mercenary said. “You hear about Big Yethet?”

“N-No?”

“Your Big Yethet! Do you know who killed him? A fucking baker! We’re trying to secure this damned city and the trade unions are rioting for, I don’t know, more hours or less hours or...why aren’t you at the Rock?”

“I’m going there now,” Eilo said. “Not a lot of clear roads at the moment. Where are you going?”

“Autumn Gate,” the lead mercenary said. “Finally going to clear out the trash around there.”

“Good fortune, then!” Eilo said, and rode past them.

He could feel their eyes on him as he rode through a plaza and up the zigzagging cobblestone street toward the Old Rock. Had he failed to give some password or sign of parting? He couldn’t worry about it now, could only ride, moving as fast as he could up the crooked street. Old Rock appeared at every switchback, rising above the brightly painted buildings in this comfortable part of town. He kept going until he hit a barricade made of overturned wagons and hastily-assembled chairs.

“Whose side are they on?” Panzu asked, noticing the glint of spears and helmets on the other side of the barricade.

A crossbow bolt zipped out from between two chairs and buried itself in his horse’s brain. The animal toppled, and Eilo barely rolled free. Another shot zipped through his coat, not quite hitting flesh, and the banisher wished he’d been able to find armor that fit, as he wore only his gentleman’s outfit under the scalloped coat.

“Alley!” Panzu called, and the banisher followed her into a narrow, pitch-black alley.

“Do you think they’ll follow us?” the wisdom cat asked.

Then a lantern snapped open, flooding the alley with light, and spears were thrust at Eilo’s face. He turned to run, but more citizen-soldiers spilled into the alley from the switchback road.

“We got one!” a man shouted.

“Looks like a boss!” a woman said.

“Don’t care, just kill him and take his swords.”

Eilo recognized that third voice.

“Manahath?” he said. “Manahath Bewou?”

A tall, dark man dressed in old-fashioned chainmail pushed past the lantern-bearer. Despite the cold air, sweat beaded on the Glyphic man’s face. He had been fighting hard—and not from the rear, if his bloody ax were any indication. His expression showed confusion but not recognition.

“It’s Eilo,” the banisher said. “Same hat, see? They killed Fylent Maer.”

“Should I kill him?” an old woman asked.

“I can’t kill a man I ate waffles with,” Manahath Bewou said. He looked the banisher up and down. “Are you going to tell me that you took a gang boss’s coat?”

“Yes,” Eilo said.

“Why should I believe you?” Manahath asked. Before Eilo could answer, he shoved the banisher against the wall and brusquely searched him. He handed Eilo’s sword, dagger, and knife out to his followers, then said, “Shit!” in his mannered southern accent. “A purple scutcheon. I’m afraid that’s all we need from you, kid.”

“You can believe him,” Panzu said from the roof overhead, “because I vouch for him.”

“What’s that?” Manahath said.

“Cat with a woman’s head,” the lantern bearer said. “Strangest damn thing.”

“A wisdom cat!” Manahath gasped. “The one who’s been telling everyone how the old duke really died, I bet. Let him go. Give him his knife back. No, not the dagger.” He looked the banisher up and down. “Where are you going?”

“They’re going to execute a friend of mine in Old Rock,” Eilo said, too tired not to speak the plain and literal truth. “I was going to use that badge to get in. Do you...want to come with me?”

“We were supposed to plan this out over the next month,” Manahath said. “But I guess we’re doing it now. We’re doing everything right now.”

So Eilo led twenty citizen-soldiers up the slope to the round door of Old Rock, which is the one they agreed mercenary companies and street gangs used to move in and out of the fortress. The fortress was built into the hill, with a central donjon many times larger than Lord Gloce’s and an irregular wall dotted with watchtowers. An irregularly shaped courtyard, hidden from their position so they could not see how many soldiers waited there, separated the walls from the donjon. While the wall’s main gate was closed, the castle looked to be on alert but not anticipating an attack.

“So,” Eilo asked, “how do we do this?”

“I thought you had a plan,” Manahath said.

“I mostly fight monsters,” the banisher said. After a moment of troubled silence from everyone: “Well, audacity has taken me this far.”

He crossed the cobbles from an old and disused gatehouse to the round door and banged on it. A sliding window opened, and Eilo held up the brass badge Mahanath had called the “purple scutcheon.”

“Where’s the rest of ‘em?” a hidden voice asked.

“Dead,” Eilo said.

“Shit,” the voice said. There was some metallic fumbling, and the round door rolled open. Eilo stepped through and saw a single castle guard in the mustard yellow tabard he had seen many times before. Two more mustard men stood on a platform higher up, staring down at the city.

“Hey,” the door guard said, “if you have a purple scutcheon, why don’t you have signal gauntlets?”

“I honestly don’t know what those are,” Eilo said. “But what’s the punishment for failure to check for gauntlets?”

“Wh-what?” the guard said.

Eilo punched him in the stomach, then dropped his elbow onto the back of his neck, just between helmet and gorget. He rolled the round door back open and twenty fighters poured on into the Old Rock. The two guards above only had halberds, not crossbows, and they threw them down when they saw how badly outnumbered they were.

“She’s gotten away!” a voice shouted from an upper floor of the donjon.

Eilo looked at the wisdom cat. Could they mean Skaithness?

“We need to open the main gate,” Manahath told the banisher. “I think you have business elsewhere.”

“Good luck, Manahath,” the banisher said. He threw off his scalloped coat so no one would shoot him by mistake and took the stone steps two at a time while Manahath’s citizen-soldiers headed for Old Rock’s main gate. The wisdom cat reached the walls first. They both stayed out of sight, but while torches lined the walls, there were fewer guards here than Eilo had expected.

“Where did she go?” the same furious voice shouted. It was now on the same level as the banisher—at the level of the walls and about halfway up the main donjon—but all the stonework made it hard to pinpoint exactly. The wall led into the main donjon in two directions.

Two hexguards armed with sabers ran out of the donjon wall, heading toward the watchtower between Eilo and the entrance into the donjon. Eilo positioned himself between the light of two torches and watched as they hesitated outside the watchtower, then crept inside. Since no guards stood between him and the tower, Eilo crept toward them, glaive held low. Two arches on either side of the watchtower offered access, and the banisher hid beside the entrance—in case the hexguards kept going, they’d miss him.

Then he heard an agonized and piteous wail from inside.

“Got her,” one hexguard said.

Eilo peered inside. A single candle burned on a wooden table. Beneath it lay a small woman in scarlet: a royal outrider, the sort that would have brought the Ovarch’s sealed orders back to the capital. The banisher scowled: one did not kill royal outriders—even the most vicious spirits did not usually trouble them. Eilo considered killing the two hexguards, but the two men hurried back into the keep before he could make up his mind.

He searched the dead woman and found an opened letter in the heavy, scented paper of the Ovarch’s court. Unexpectedly, it was a stay of execution for Skaithness, and an inquiry regarding the “swamp cult” situation that the Ovarch and the Bishop of Geshun had heard about.

“Maybe they killed the messenger so they could execute Skaithness and claim the message never arrived,” Panzu said. “Or maybe—they’re back!”

The two hexguards returned, berated by a castle captain in a mustard-yellow tabard and mirrored greaves. The captain remained in the door leading to the keep, shouting insults.

“You can’t just leave her there, fools! What were you thinking? And get the letter!”

The hexguards grumbled and hurried back. The banisher hid in the little tower room, as he could not escape in either direction without the captain seeing him, but he was sure the hexguards would find him. Just as they entered the room, ducking so their steel hats would fit, Panzu streaked out the way Eilo had entered.

“What was that?” one hexguard said.

“Hey! Hey!” Panzu said from outside. “Look at me, I’m a talking cat!”

The guards drew their swords and followed the voice.

“I’m a talking cat who is distracting you.”

Eilo stepped behind the hexguards. Two twists with his glaive’s hook sent the men tumbling to their deaths. They smashed into the flagstones of the courtyard far below.

“Good work,” Panzu said. But Eilo was looking down into the courtyard, where a massive battle raged between the factions fighting over the city. Or perhaps I should say “among,” as the banisher had only seen Lady Ryphonia’s loyalists fighting the soldiers and gangsters of the Trusted Seven, and had no knowledge of the Champions of the Gate, the Swords of Marafer, or the other factions whose long-simmering disputes had finally exploded into open violence.

Torchlight gleamed off helmets and swords down below, and men and women screamed as they fought and died. The gate was open, and citizen-soldiers were making their way up the switchback road toward Old Rock.

The castle guard captain didn’t see the banisher at all; instead he took one look at the open gate and ran back inside to sound a general alarm. Eilo sprinted after him, into the donjon. He hid around the corner when he heard the captain talking to more guards. The guards ran off in different directions, and the captain headed back toward Eilo and Panzu.

The banisher led with his fist, knocking the captain to the ground. He ripped the man’s sword from its scabbard and leveled it at his throat.

“The girl in the armor,” he said. “Where is she?”

“I…”

“This is your one and only chance,” the banisher said, cutting the man’s cheek with the tip of the blade.

“The old princess’s apartments,” he said. “Up the stairs, the rooms closest to the cliff. She’s probably already dead.”

The banisher just left the captain and ran up the stairs. He passed a landing full of Trezion’s Boys. One of them said, “Hey…” as he ran past, but they didn’t pursue him.

“Get me a clear route,” he told the wisdom cat.

“What? You mean, by going ahead? I don’t want to get shot, banisher.”

“You can’t be hurt by steel!” Eilo said.

“I can’t be killed by steel,” the wisdom cat said. “It feels terrible to get hit with an arrow, I assure you.”

“Cat, I am not leaving here without Skaithness.”

“Fine, fine,” Panzu said. She shot up the steps, then down a wide carpeted hall with a painted ceiling undergoing restoration. The wisdom cat had to scout ahead, double back, and even lead Eilo out across an unfinished exterior restoration full of iron support bars and crooked timbers, but she got him around the guards, who were running everywhere in confusion as citizen-soldiers flooded into the courtyard.

At last, the banisher reached the apartments. The old princess had died years ago, and blankets covered the splendid furniture; the air smelled like mildew and unfashionable perfumes. The apartments sprawled across dozens of rooms, above and below him. Eilo prepared to ascend the stairs, then he heard shouting below him: a man’s deep voice almost completely swallowed by a roaring sound, like a strong wind.

“This is ridiculous! Can’t it wait until after we deal with these pathetic rebels?”

“No! She dies now!”

“Aklurian,” the wisdom cat said. She flew down the steps.

Eilo hurried down the winding stairs and reached a marble archway carved in the shape of leaping dolphins. Two hexguards lay dead, their blood staining the marble and flowing slowly into the grooves of a tiled floor. Panzu wore her mostly-human form; she licked her bloody claws with a raspy cat-tongue. Eilo stepped over the dead men and into a large chamber covered in beautiful but faded frescoes, and full of mist that turned the light from jeweled lanterns hazy and indistinct. Old perfume and incense fouled the air, cloying and musky, like a funeral for a body left out too long. Rusted and verdigrised mechanisms of iron and brass lay everywhere amid the elegant, mildewy furnishings.

“Just throw her off the damn wall,” a castle guard was saying. “That’ll smash her bones to jelly even if we can’t get at her.”

The castle guard—one of three—stood around an irregularly shaped ceramic pool of considerable size that was, thanks to the actions of a complicated brass plumbing mechanism on the far wall, rapidly filling with water. Across from him, with his back facing the banisher, stood Aklurian in his tall hexguard helmet, his knives at his hips.

Skaithness was leaned up against the frescoed wall to Eilo’s left like a sarcophagus, her mask sealed, bound head to toe in chains.

“A fall might not do it,” Aklurian said. “And what if it breaks the chains again? No, we got the order. We’ll drown her.”

“You actually didn’t get the order,” the castle guard said.

“Do it!” Aklurian shouted. “Push her in!”

“It’ll take another five minutes, at least,” the mustard guard said, studying the water level.

“Are you sure I’ll even sink, Captain?” Skaithness’s voice echoed from within her sealed armor.

“You shut up!” Aklurian snapped.

“I’m just trying to help.”

She kept talking, and it was obvious to Eilo that she was just trying to buy him time, as she kept up a steady stream of prattle that infuriated and distracted Aklurian. The banisher had to act: he shifted his boots on the tile floor so he wouldn’t slip, then rushed the hexguard and brought his glaive down in a whistling arc.

But the castle guards saw him, and Aklurian turned—just in time. The glaive clipped the hexguard’s armored torso and knocked him to the ground, but the blow was not fatal—not even enough to take Aklurian out of the fight. The banisher spun the glaive and brought its butt end down, but Aklurian rolled and bounded to his feet, steel knife in his right hand and monstrous tooth in his left.

But before Aklurian could spring for the banisher, the three castle guards charged with their straight-bladed swords. Two ran around one side of the pool and the last leaped all the way over it. Eilo didn’t really want to kill these men, but when one scored a cut across his ribs with a sword, he growled and hurled that man into the pool, then ducked a beheading swing and swept his glaive in a whistling downward arc that cut another man’s hand off.

Aklurian got in close with both blades, forcing the banisher to adjust his glaive between one parry and the next. They both slipped on the tiles as puddles of blood spread all around the pool.

“Panzu!” Eilo shouted, parrying. He wasn’t sure if the wisdom cat was willing to approach the hexguard and his spiritually toxic aura of hate and fear. She was not; instead, Panzu slinked around the corner, looking entirely human now in her long black coat, and headed for Skaithness.

Meanwhile, it was all the banisher could do to hold off the two attackers—who soon became three when the man he had knocked into the pool scrambled back over the ledge and rejoined the fight. Eilo was good, especially since he wielded a weapon unfamiliar even to veteran soldiers, but he was outnumbered and on slippery, difficult terrain. The banisher was bleeding from his flank, wrist, and thigh, and one shoulder was numb after a pummeling blow from Aklurian’s fang-knife.

He was losing. They were forcing him toward the pool, where they could finish him at their leisure.

And then they all heard the slither-clank-slither of chains sliding away.

The castle guards fell back, away from both Eilo and the chains. Aklurian slipped on the wet floor, and the banisher knocked the steel dagger from his hands. The hexguard retreated, then turned and saw Skaithness as she shook off the last length of chain.

Panzu huddled in the corner, avoiding Aklurian’s gaze. She had a ring of keys in her hands, taken from the dead guard.

“Your castle is under attack,” Skaithness told the two surviving castle guards. “You should worry about that, not this problem Aklurian has with me.”

But Aklurian tossed a pole to one of the guards and grabbed one himself. The poles were solid iron, probably used to manage the plumbing.

“Just get her in the water,” he said. “That’s all it takes.”

They spread out around Skaithness, careful to keep their eyes on the banisher, who was wounded but still dangerous. The castle guard with the iron bar lunged suddenly for Skaithness. The armored woman’s gauntleted hand snapped out, caught the iron bar, and used it to pull the guard toward her. She grabbed his face with her other hand and crushed it. Teeth clattered onto the porcelain around the edge of the pool, then plip-plip-plipped into the water.

The other castle guard fled, a mustard blur of terror.

Skaithness prudently stepped away from the still-filling pool.

“You can’t win, Aklurian,” she said. “Why are you fighting me? Why aren’t you fighting the Mollusk Knight? He’s coming, you know.”

Aklurian couldn’t find anything to say; he just snarled, hurled his iron bar at Skaithness to no effect, and fled.

“You really came for me!” Skaithness said, stepping toward the banisher.

“Please don’t hug me,” he said. His ribs hurt.

“Horrible man,” Panzu muttered. “You should’ve killed him.”

An explosion rocked the castle and plaster rained from the ceiling. Someone had found a bombard. The banisher limped out onto a balcony and looked down onto the courtyard. It was like a vision of some painted hell: fire, swords, and blood. Screams rose up like the shrieks of the damned.

“We appear to have set off a civil war,” Eilo said. But it looked like the Trusted Seven’s faction was all but defeated. Castle guards and the duke’s loyalists lay in bloody heaps, or stood disarmed and surrounded by citizen-soldiers. Down the hill, at a new fort built to overlook the still-burning docks, the duke’s star-and-wheat flag went down, replaced by a green flag with five crescents. Eilo knew that one, since Lady Ryphonia had worn that design on a ring when she visited Castle Nysse.

One corner of Old Rock smoked and fulminated: a bombard had exploded during the fighting. So it took Eilo a few minutes to notice the reinforcements riding through the open gate. Lady Ryphonia headed the column, flanked by two armored handmaidens with lanterns and followed by thirty cavalry officers. The banisher recognized her with a start: she had the same chestnut brown hair, except now it flowed out behind her in waves as she passed through the smoke into the middle of the courtyard. People screamed her name.

There was a brief, final battle against the mustard guards as Manahath’s faction claimed the last of Old Rock’s bombards. As Lady Ryphonia arrived, word swept through the ranks that Manahath had died in the courtyard battle. In truth—as the historian Heles of Sul would later prove, and whose events would eventually be dramatized by Irsivandri’s opera The Palace Clock, Manahath had been murdered by nativist gangs outside the Palace of Justice, but those events have little direct bearing on what happened next in Old Rock.

“I think I’ve seen enough,” the banisher said. He went back into the bath house and stripped out of his tattered coat so Panzu could bind his wounds. “I don’t feel like we’ve won a victory here. The Mollusk Knight is still coming, and we still don’t know how to stop him.”

“I actually have some ideas,” Skaithness said. She turned a gilded wheel and the flow of water stopped. “I spoke with some religious scholars here in the city the first time I escaped, after they tried to hang me. There is an island off the coast that is said to be made entirely of metal!”

“I’ve heard those rumors,” Panzu said as she finished tying a tourniquet above the banisher’s knee. “The Ergot Duke established a pirate base there before his death. But his pirates fled when he died, and no one knows where it is now.”

“There was an operetta about it,” Eilo said. “It was terrible.”

“It’s where I need to go,” Skaithness said. “It has what will let me, or the Mollusk Knight, bring about a new age of this world. I know what it is now: not a throne. A key.”

“A key?” Eilo asked.

“A crooked key,” Skaithness said. “That’s what the scholar said.”

“I’ve read about that,” Panzu said. “The first Ovarch was said to have worn a crooked key when he found the Egg of Eime. He used it to open the Egg, then cast it away, saying that it would not be needed for as long as the truth of the Egg endured. The story is suppressed, but it appears in certain legends.”

“And an operetta?” Eilo said.

“A good one?” Panzu asked.

“Thankfully not. Is the crooked key on the island?” Eilo asked. “And does the Mollusk Knight know, or just you and this scholar?”

“He probably knows,” the armored woman said. “But I don’t think he knows how to get there. There’s a trick to it: a lighthouse.”

“Who the hell told you all this?” the banisher asked, limping back out onto the balcony and buttoning up his jacket.

“This place is full of faithful worshipers of the Egg of Eime,” Skaithness said. “And almost as many people who are frustrated with the church. Many have looked to the past in order to find a way to the future. I spoke with a mendicant during my brief escape.”

“Can we speak to him?” the banisher asked.

“I’m afraid they hanged him for speaking to me,” Skaithness said, her normal good cheer vanishing for a moment.

“So we get to this lighthouse and—”

“You two can get to the lighthouse,” Panzu said. “I’m reclaiming my library and leaving for the Glyphic Islands. I’ve done my part. Look what I did.” She swept a paw across the carnage that her whispers had unleashed upon the city. The balcony rumbled again: someone was still firing a bombard or cannon, though they could not see where.

“At least we won!” Skaithness said.

It was then that a tower of green stone burst up through the courtyard, killing a hundred or more soldiers and obliterating most of Old Rock’s outer wall. It took several minutes for the dust to settle, and in that time the banisher was one of the few people in the castle moving with purpose: he retraced his steps through the apartments, heading for the walls. Skaithness followed him; so—reluctantly—did Panzu.

When he was outside again, things floated over the spike that resembled squids with armored skulls. As Eilo watches, their tentacles uncoiled and swept across the courtyard. Whoever was touched by them fell down dead.

*