Then Marvel Parsons cast his glass bottle and whatever enigmatic liquid it contained at the group of outlaws, and the bottle shattered and exploded upward some concoction of gases and fumes that began immediately to choke them. They fell to their knees. The cloud enveloped them and John could see nothing of them for long seconds—he only heard their choking and gagging as he backed away into a far corner of the great hall, distancing himself as much as possible from whatever had been inside the bottle. The Hierophant and Michael immediately slipped out through a small service doorway located just behind the great table.
The cloud spread to the main entrance, where even the two guards posted by the door succumbed to it. John realized Tygo had followed him. He was there too, pressed into the corner, listening to the death of the men inside the miasma.
There was nothing to do but wait. He looked down at the smaller man, pained. “Do you really speak to angels?”
“Only that one time. With my shaving mirror.”
“What about tellochvovin?”
Tygo had a manner of looking entirely calm, even disinterested, when he said surprising things. “I made that up so you would believe me.”
John only nodded. O. Of course. “Is this the Return?”
Tygo raised his eyebrows. “No. But we’ll all die if we stay here. That’s the truth. Those lights are meteors. Bound for the Cape. Nothing here will survive when they hit.”
“There will not be three more appearing soon, to make five, to carry us heavenward?”
“No.”
A muted thud: it was his heart sinking. He hadn’t realized how he had hoped. “O.”
Almost off-handedly, Tygo said after a time, “That man Mr. Capulatio is the True King, though. We should save him.”
“What?”
“I saw it in my vision. He is David. He’s needed in Kansas. That’s where I came from.” Now Tygo was shrugging. “I told you some of the truth.”
John wrinkled his brow, putting his fingertips to his temples. “Why didn’t you just tell me all of this?”
“You wouldn’t have believed me.” Tygo’s face, unmoving, until his mouth twitched downward into a small smile.
Then they saw the one-handed woman. She was walking toward them around the cloud, just skirting the edge of it. Completely fearless. Her expression made no sense—she was smiling. “You believe in him,” she said to them.
But before Tygo could move, the four guards advanced on the thinning cloud and began stabbing the four men, until they were covered in blood and motionless, just piles of bloodstained clothing, limbs splayed this way and that. John hoped they were dead before the blows, but he suspected they were probably not. John’s eyes fell on the pile of men, and he saw—at the same time Tygo saw—that David, Mr. Capulatio, the True King—was nowhere.
The guards turned their pikes toward the woman, but she raised her arms again, so her sleeves again fell and revealed her stump. “I am helpless,” she said. “Just a mutilated captive!”
They looked to John. “Don’t just stand there, seize her!” he said, although he did not know why. The woman looked dangerous, but not like she would do them immediate harm.
One took hold of her. She held John’s eyes with her own horrible ones; they were like holes gored out by an animal. “A long time ago, I had an accident,” she said. “It cost me my ability to bear children. Before my accident, I could see things. Not the future. No one can see the future. But I could see other things. People’s hearts. What drove them. But seeing made me unhappy.” Her cheeks had flushed with the exertion of speaking. “You had a vision,” she said to Tygo. “Of my husband?”
“I suppose.”
“Tell me.”
“There’s a man in Kansas, a kind of high priest. The Mystagogue. I was taken up on charges of Surgery. To work off my debt they made me his servant. That was when I had my vision. He believed me.” Tygo’s face seemed to dissolve and re-form. “The Mystagogue knew my vision to be genuine. So he sent me here. To get David.” He pointed to the dissipating cloud. “To bring him back.”
“You believe,” she said again, to both of them this time. “Without a text to guide you.”
In the weird light choked by the fumes of the phlegmatic gases, John wanted to answer yes. But it was not that he believed in that man, her husband. He believed in Tygo. He believed in Tygo’s vision. John pulled at his ill-fitting jeweled collar, finally yanking it off. Without thinking, he dropped it onto the floor.
Tygo replied, surprise in his voice. “Yes, I guess I do. I didn’t, until I did. And then I had no choice.”
“What about you?” the woman asked John.
But Tygo answered for him. “John requires proof.”
She nodded like the answer satisfied her.
John muttered, “Shouldn’t you two save your king? He must be unconscious by now, or dead.”
“What should I do with the woman?” asked the guard.
“Let her go. What can she do? She’s a cripple.”
When she was free, the woman remarked, “It is the way of faith that it often feels like despair.”
* * *
John and Tygo walked out of the tower and into the courtyard, across a plank bridge that led over the ornamental stream that trickled through the compound. The evening stillness breathtaking. No siege had yet begun. Just a few courtiers strolling the closing market stalls. No murmurs leaking from beyond the walls, none they could hear, anyway. It was unclear, in that moment, what would happen. The strange woman had simply walked away from them.
They stood in the hushed glare of the sunset—at the very end of the day the sun had broken through again. John watched the sky, feeling the weight of his accumulated failures begin to dissolve. All his life he had suffered to make his work matter, and of course, he had been wrong the entire time. Altogether wrong.
About all of it.
But
