Then, if Juniper truly had come from Kansas, Marvel would bring him along as a guide.
He sat down. He took a breath.
But that would be too dangerous. How could he be sure Juniper wouldn’t murder him in the night? Marvel was fifty one, large and healthy, but no one could survive a head bashed to a bloody pulp by a tree limb. Or a throat slitting.
It was best he go alone. Now.
But the poisonous land. He didn’t trust any Walking Doctor’s maps, didn’t trust himself to remember how he had crossed the deathscapes at fourteen—it had been luck, pure and simple, though back then he’d believed it was a divine blessing for killing the Mystagogue. He didn’t trust a carnival man to take him because they often made mistakes in their navigation. Whole carnivals died all the time, it was well known.
And if Marvel did make it to Kansas, seat of Dread? What then? Where the gruesome cows still lurched on their cloven hooves, eating the dead and the living indiscriminately, where dark monks did dark magic and prayed for the end of the world? Marvel could hardly imagine it.
Only that morning, he’d assumed he’d soon make the journey alone, but finally doing so was not as easy as planning for it. He had known it would not be, and still he had not imagined he would feel such fear.
Marvel stared blankly at the desk. It had been Michael’s father Leander’s desk, and many other kings’ before him, and was a thing of great beauty. Marvel had believed for years that he should give it up—he was an ascetic now. It was not his, of course, which lessened his guilt. Hewn from mahogany centuries before, deeply varnished and nearly as wide as it was long, it bore many of his tinctures and oils, and accounts, diagrams for magical rites, Michael’s infernal horoscopes (how the king loved having that silly astronomer, John Sousa, draw up horoscopes for him, a habit Marvel found particularly repellent).
He picked up a bottle. The liquid could become poison if he wished, with only a few drops from another glass dropper. When, at the tender age of nineteen, he had achieved his first assassination for Leander, he had been very unskilled. He had accidentally killed an entire dinner party, and very nearly also murdered John Sousa, then just a boy. The intended victim had been Sousa’s mother, pregnant by Leander and becoming very shrill about it. John Sousa had hated Marvel ever since, of course. As was his right.
He rang a bell for a servant, turned around in his chair, and opened his shades. There were the outlaws, camped down by the shore, not beside the compound wall where they usually set up camp when they brought their yearly tributes. In fact, the outlaws were very close to the first watchtower in the defense line, which was barely visible from Marvel’s window. This was intentional, he supposed; the earthworks were long neglected. Why should the outlaws fear an unmanned defense line?
They had no intent to surprise, obviously.
The servant knocked. Marvel’s knees cracked when he stood. He pulled open the slot on his chamber door. A middle-aged man with yellow hair whose name Marvel could never recall looked at him nervously. “You called, Majesty.”
“I need a man to ride out to that carnival on the plain and discover their business. They shouldn’t be here.” He spoke as though no one should be worried.
“That has already been ordered by the king. The riders will be back shortly. But I have more news for you.”
“Proceed, then.”
“A guard has returned with the Chief Orbital Doctor. And a captive in chains. They wait for you in the Receiving Room.”
“I didn’t send for Sousa. I don’t want to see him now.”
“He would not not be seen, sir.”
“Tell him to go away.”
The servant bowed. “I would very much like to, but he’s in a bad temper and he says he has something very important to tell you about the … comet, he’s calling it.”
It would not do to insult John Sousa. He was unfortunately one of King Michael’s favorites. The Sousas had been at Cape Canaveral a thousand years. John had harbored an especial loathing for him since Marvel had registered distaste at the expense of Urania, John’s gaudy manor castle. Had the astronomer truly needed his own observatory, a castle in miniature, with all the contraptions and instruments his heart desired? Marvel hadn’t thought so. By that time, the extravagance of the Cape had worn him down, and he was rejecting plans for improvement everywhere. But Michael had been happy enough to override Marvel’s judgment, with the caveat that the Astronomer should feed and house any and all of the numerous foreign Orbital Doctors who might come to cast yet more horoscopes and make yet more detailed predictions of the Return Date; it was, after all, His Majesty’s passion to know the exact Day and Time.
“I will see them,” Marvel mumbled, and slid shut the viewing slot.
He wanted to pray. He had, in past times of confusion, prayed before any decision. But today he felt empty of magic.
His rooms were paneled in stained wood, because the rooms in Huldah’s Black Tower in Kansas had been made of volcanic rock and were very dark and close. Since he was a boy, work meant a dim room. Daylight was time off, a game, a ride on a horse. But Marvel’s eye was drawn now to a gray trapezoid of light that had fallen on the floor when he pulled up the shades, and he went to it and knelt. His hands on the bare floor looked suddenly old to him, and he closed his eyes.
At the moment of his un-kingly birth in the Black Watchtower, his mother the nun had been nearing thirty-four years of age and had been attempting to have a child for seven years. Marvel had learned her age from a compendium of royal personages he found in the Tower
