“What about Mr. Capulatio?”
“Tragic.” She pushed back the wet strands of her hair. “He chose worldly delight over Heaven. It’s a story for the ages. Not our problem.”
“I thought you loved him.”
Orchid yanked the chain, but gently. “More than you could ever know.”
* * *
They began walking before the sun rose. Orchid had not unchained her. The girl did not expect her to for a long time. A burst of doves from the brush on one side startled them and the girl shrieked, but Orchid laughed. The way they were going was unknown to both of them, until at last one of the Walking Doctors’ symbols appeared in the shady murk of the forest morning, on a tree trunk, when the sun had risen to just above the tree line but all the moisture was still trapped below it as under a dome. The mark was small, shaped like a weasel inside a wheel. The girl said, “I can’t read this one.”
“Try.”
“I was only a child when I would go around to the sick with my mother.”
“You are only a child now. Try.”
But it was useless. The weasel could mean anything. They might as well have been stepping onto a field soaked with the Disease. “I don’t know.”
They went helplessly forward, for what could they do, until many hours later they discovered another mark, this time on a narrow-trunked pine. Behind them was a flat field with white winter flowers. A mule walked unbridled in the grass, grazing, flaring his lips and chewing. The girl put her fingers on the mark. A square, plain, and a woman’s body floating above its left side. Something about the image weightless. She remembered it. “We go left. Right is the Disease.”
And so in this way they began to make their way toward Kansas, from tree to tree, pole to pole, leaving behind the countryside outlying Cape Canaveral. A myriad of changes to the landscape as they crossed it—even the ground became more solid, the low tree branches no longer twisted by ceaseless coastal winds, the piles of storm-shredded debris thinning out as they walked—they left the Cape behind, the girl and the woman, as they walked toward the Center of the World, what Orchid said was called the Watchtower of the Universe. “We will discover the truth in the texts there,” said Orchid as they walked, through tight lips. “The truth is knowable to those who would seek it.”
Maybe, thought the girl. She wished all of a sudden that she had managed to take Cosmas, the Head Argento had made for her. So they would look like magicians. It was stupid to travel without one. The girl still did not know if magic was real, or if her mother had been right and faith was a delusion. She did not know if Orchid would kill her. Or if she herself was a law-giver, a sigil, a concubine, or a queen. She felt like none of those things, and all of them.
She was a girl with feet walking toward Kansas.
She was a girl who had delivered the world from Wonderblood.
She was mercy, and mercy was a woman.
CHAPTER 26
THE BREACH
Marvel had thought he would have until dawn. In his wildest imagination, he hadn’t believed the outlaw carnival could mount so quick an attack. He’d barely left Michael to prepare his own flight when he heard, from his own tower chamber, an explosion as the outlaws blew up the water-gate. The only point where the wall was not ten feet thick.
When he heard the blast, Marvel had taken a deep breath. Yes. He would probably die now. Certainly. Not even as a deserter, or a martyr, but simply a casualty of an ordinary coup. The irony almost amused him.
He stood in the black night air on his own balcony. He’d been in the middle of throwing a few things in a sack when the blast rocked the ground. He had been, in fact, holding the drawing of his mother, Nasa Whiteside. At the explosion, he teetered unsteadily but caught his balance against his desk. The framed picture fell to the ground. His mother, the failure. Pushed to her death by the Mystagogue.
Her death would most likely go unavenged after all.
He went to his balcony and looked through a spyglass, trying to see a route of escape. The wind was blowing. Water had rushed in over the limestone streets. An icing of water, thin as a cake topping. Below him the world was awash with noise and flickering torches—screams, grunts, cries of pain. Fighting seemed to have sprung up without warning. The sound of it was both immediate and distant, like a noise one hears in one’s sleep and is reshaped by a dream. For a moment he didn’t care what happened to anyone, even himself.
The outlaws had gained the compound but were not near the towers yet. They were vastly underarmed, slashing forward only with their clubs and pikes. They kept exploding some substance—he suspected they had barrels of oil, scavenged probably from the same spots where the Cape got theirs, the hidden troves abandoned by the ancients all those years ago. When a head guard had come to him for guidance after the explosion, Marvel slammed shut the slot on his door and locked it. They would break it down to get at him, soon. Someone would.
At his desk he swept more of his bottles and droppers into a hard-sided case. Whether to take them with him, or to have something to do for the moment, he wasn’t sure. He had already packed his most important unctions. The bottles made a sound like water as they fell together. He could sort them out later, if he was alive. He knew each bottle by
