Liuprand was panting, his eyes flung wide and wheeling with a wild, animal panic; every moment seemed to prove more the truth of Thrasamund’s words. His face was flush against the curve of Agnes’s throat, near enough that her death wound was dripping its sluggish black dregs upon his tongue. As if by instinct, he licked his lips, and then—realizing the horror of what he had done—he choked, and another sob wrung from deep in his chest.
“There, have your fill of her,” Thrasamund murmured. He laid a hand on Liuprand’s naked back, almost a comforting gesture, had he not then squeezed it and raked his nails along it, provoking from the prince a pitiable moan. “Indulge your every appetite now, for this is the last feast you will ever have. From here on your body will know nothing but ache and longing. Your manhood, too, has spilled its final drop.” A faint, rumbling laugh. “Would that your father had not needed an heir, else he could have gelded you sooner, kept you like one of Hartwig’s eunuch boy-slaves.”
Liuprand did not beg—what would he have begged for? If there is no reason or wisdom to be found in love, there is even less to be found in pain. His mind had no more capacity for thought than a fish has for flight. His heart beat, but only to force his anguish gruelingly through his veins. He grasped at Agnes’s face, turning it toward his, as if he could make her eyes look upon him, her eyes that saw nothing anymore. He tried to wake her with a kiss, but both their mouths were slippery with blood, and his lips could not find purchase upon hers.
Here was what remained of his once-grand and encompassing love. It had been a bright thing, lustrous as the sun itself, and it had painted the world all in gold. Had any saneness remained in him—had he even still the ability to speak—Liuprand might have begged LordThrasamund to robe the world once more in its colored vestments, to apply the varnish of passion and romance that made all things charming and luminous again.
For without passion’s tints and romance’s pigments, the world was too repugnant and painful to bear. Even Thrasamund’s men, who had previously shed all such sentiments, began to feel the chamber’s lack of love and started trembling. Their faces went pale; sweat dewed their brows. Those who had looked on with avarice and lust now had the air of illness about them, and they averted their gazes at last. They stared with too-great intent at the torches smoking on the walls, at the flowers drifting across the surface of the water, and at other inhuman things, which were not so alive—or so dead—as to repulse them.
This seemed, finally, to please Thrasamund. His smile was broad and almost artless; for a moment, he was a shade of the jovial man he had once been. He gave the flesh of Liuprand’s back another cruel squeeze and let his fingers sink in deep enough to draw blood.
“Have you the strength for another bout?” he asked, chuckling with unreserved glee. “I can wet her thighs with more blood, if you wish.”
Liuprand only moaned, wordless.
“Very well.”
Thrasamund raised his head and cast his gaze about the chamber. He beckoned two more of his men, who came to crowd the altar. At their lord’s direction, they seized Liuprand about the arms and tried to lift him, but his body was huge and iron-heavy, and the prince had gone utterly still. It took yet another pair of men to heave him successfully from the altar. His legs, with their garish and oozing wounds, dragged limply behind him. A trail of blood smeared the floor in his wake.
“You.” Thrasamund jerked his chin toward Ninian, cached in her corner with Offal-Eater. “Come now. And you may as well bring the wretched creature with you. My men have set upon Castle Crudele with every sword that the House of Eyes can muster, and they are eager to take their vengeance. This thing will have what he was promised, too. Let him tell me if Seraphine blood tastes of honey and wine.”
Silently, Ninian stepped out from the darkness and beckonedOffal-Eater to follow. He bounded after her, yet she cast one brief, solitary glance back. It was a look that made her mismatched eyes turbulent, dozens of emotions passing through them like flotsam on the foaming tide, but none among them could be counted as regret. She loved her mistress with every beat of her heart’s blood, and she had hated her abusers in equal measure, and here was its profit. She would not be shamed for it. It was too long that she had craved revenge, and the time for any misgivings had passed. She was a cold creature now, as the princess had trained her, and she had executed her mistress’s orders to their ends. She slipped through the chapel door and was gone.
The men who had arranged Agnes’s body remained stood at the altar. There was a hollowness to their gazes, and when the one spoke, his voice was hoarse. “What should we do with her, my lord?”
Thrasamund tilted his head. He put a finger under his chin, feigning contemplativeness. This was the bloody theater of his old self, shining once more through the gauze of bitterness and malice.
“What did our ancestors do,” he said, “before the conquerors slit their throats and killed our customs?”
The men exchanged stupid glances.
“Fool of me to expect an answer from you dullards.” Thrasamund let out a revolted breath. “Did you not have a grandmother, a wet nurse, who whispered to you such stories at their breasts? The old ways may have died, but they were not sufficiently desecrated as to be beyond resurrection. Let this lady be the first in a century to be dedicated in accordance with Drepane’s ancient traditions. It is the line of Berengar, and his laws, that will be snuffed out now.”
Thrasamund’s retainers knew no more of Drepane’s bygone customs than a flea knows of the laws of men. But they were obedient to their lord and they listened. They nodded as he spelled out his orders and gave not even a whisper of protest. They had no sense of a world before Berengar’s conquest, but their fathers and grandfathers had served the House of Eyes for generations; their loyalty was, too, a groove well worn.
And so they reached for the lady Agnes, whose corpse wasbeginning to grow cold. The blood had dried, and it nearly stuck her to the stone. But they managed, nonetheless, to drag her from the altar and heft her into their arms, one man holding her wrists and the other her ankles, her body swinging between them like a pendulum. Her long black hair brushed the floor.
They carried her through the open door, out of the chapel that now held only the stench of death within, the remains of love corrupted and gone foul. Thrasamund closed the door soundly behind him, with the quiet rasping of iron against stone. And then all three men, along with Agnes’s corpse, began their winding descent.
XXVI
Progenitrix
Despite being built by the hands of the conqueror—or, more rightly, by his Seraphine masons—Castle Crudele was not fitted to serve all the needs of mainland nobles, much less kings. That is to say, there were not many appropriate facilities for the purpose Thrasamund sought. All of Drepane had been, for a century, governed by the laws of the Septinsular Covenant, and the line of Berengar was not exempt. Not until this moment had any man seriously questioned the supremacy of the Covenant. Even Adele-Blanche, the great witch woman, the sharp-toothed striga herself, had only dared to prod gingerly at these laws, testing their firmness by conducting her secret rites, playing her traitorous music upon the instrument that was her granddaughter Agnes. And yet even her best-laid plans and posthumous orders had not been enough to persuade Castle Crudele to give up its secrets.
It had been years now since Agnes herself had given these orders even a passing thought, and no other living creature within the castle had reason to dream of, much less to scheme about, what lay beyond the veil of death. Life was itself trial enough. The more thoughtful creatures, those with the most reasoned minds, such as Pliny the leech, pondered its many questions and probed its many elements, but strove no further. Their philosophies skimmed the waters of existence yet never plumbed its sepulchral depths.
Lord Thrasamund was not such a one as to even entertain these abstruse questions about life, and so of course he did not contemplate its inverse, either. His thoughts lay—as most men’s do—with onlywhat his eyes could see or what his hands could touch. The matter before him was one of means. How could he arrange the world so it suited his desires? Though he and his men had taken Castle Crudele, he had no intention of seeking out its mysteries. It was no more than an object to him. That its foundation had been watered with blood and that its walls had contained every depraved horror had no relevance to his aims. He felt their unnatural coldness, but still—its stones were merely stones. He had no sense of their hideous power.
The Master of Eyes led his men down into the castle dungeons, and they stumbled after him, carrying the body of the lady Agnes among them in their trembling arms. She was still a slight woman, even with the healthy accumulation of weight in recent years, but the absence of a soul seemed to make her physical form more burdensome. Her corpse dangled limply, just inches above the ground.
In the deepest depths of the dungeon, where the floor is little more than packed dirt and the ceiling sparkles with the dampness of the heaving earth, there is, at the end of a narrow corridor, a door. The door is made of dense and cumbrous gray stone. Rather than a knob, as an ordinary door would have, there is only a lock: a bolt of iron that is far too heavy for a single man to lift alone.
It was so cold in this corridor that the breath of Lord Thrasamund and his retainers plumed out in clouds of white. They laid Agnes’s body for a moment in the dirt while they raised the enormous latch. There was the hushing of iron against stone.
The chamber within was as black as the inky innards of a squid. The Master of Eyes thrust his torch into every corner, briefly scattering the shadows there, and finding only dank and squalid air. Not even so low a creature as a worm inhabited this place. The only life was that which Thrasamund and his men had brought with them, their own weakly sputtering spirits, like a lamp burning the last of its vivifying oils, so feeble against death’s colossal darkness. Some animal part of their minds seemed to recognize this, and all three shivered.
This chamber had once been a vault that had contained the riches of the Crown, gold carried on ships from Seraph to furnish Drepane’snew rulers. Yet now it lay empty—every coin spent without return. For seven brief years it had stored the gold of the House of Teeth, siphoned in a slow drip from Castle Peake, but now the spigot had been turned and this watercourse dried to a parched ditch. Princess Marozia had ceased all deliveries of goods and coin from the House of Teeth to Castle Crudele weeks ago. Had the prince not been so preoccupied with his mistress, perhaps he would have noticed.
