Marvel and Juniper were invisible now that the greatest prize had been captured. Juniper dragged him forward, toward the gate. Did he know Alyson was Marvel’s daughter? Marvel felt demented. He ran with Juniper not thirty feet from where Michael was lying in the cold, shallow water, half his body above it and half his body below. He held Alyson still.
Marvel slid with Juniper through the cart-gate, onto the plain, into the night, away from the torchlights and the smoke and the guards in their masks and the carnival men with bloody smeared faces and their piked Heads. Juniper led them through it all as though he had done it a hundred times before. Marvel took one measured breath. It was over. He could have done nothing, in the end—what would his poison have done, besides prolong the inevitable? They would still have been killed. He told himself that. He must believe it.
Juniper walked just in front of him now, his own Head swinging from the canvas sacks on his belt with every step he took. That’s the only one I ever made. He had stolen a torch and lit it once they were far enough into the forest.
Suddenly, watching the guard’s dim form, Marvel felt a cold dread seep into him.
The Head. He had forgotten about that. Only magicians made Heads.
But he followed because he did not know what else to do.
The world beyond was dark, and they had a long way to go.
CHAPTER 27
FORTUNE
The dawn birds cheered when David mounted the giant stage inside the palace compound, crying out their morning songs, though the sun had yet to break the horizon. A song of wild anticipation, the new day, the new day.
John stood below the stage, far enough away to be out of reach of the blood, though he was still soaked head to toe with blood from the battle. His hands as he studied them; the blood had dried in the lines, forming broken trails, like a map someone had drawn and erased. Tygo had had the sense to wash. John looked over at his ear-holes, the wet hair slick on the sides of his head, and then back to the stage.
Michael was dragged up on the shell-shaped stage by two of David’s men. John had never seen him look so confused. David bent and whispered something to him, and Michael seemed to agree, his body arranged tightly now in anticipation of his death. He wore wet and dirty clothes: no time to spare, John thought, when there is a new king to be made.
Michael was so unsteady on his feet that John wondered if he’d somehow gotten hold of one of the Hierophant’s unctions; that would have been a mercy. John did believe he deserved mercy. He moved as if sleepwalking, over to the block, and there placed his head on the smooth blackness. A wide silence opened over the crowd.
David called out, in a startlingly hoarse voice. “I am the True King. I have taken my seat at the most holy place in the world, where man did once take flight and where he did leave the world and enter Heaven. Today we depose a false king, from an unrighteous line of false kings. Today we are set right, cosmically. With this act, we enter an age of mercy. Wonderblood, the rinsing of the world in blood for one Eon, is over.” He paused. “After this, there will be no more beheadings. After this, the world is healed and we await the imminent Return.”
Michael looked up from the block. He had no one to look at. John hoped that he could see him there, watching.
Then he realized Michael would think him a traitor, and felt sad.
“How does it feel to be last?” David asked Michael loudly. “That is a fate any king would wish for. That his death might stay the hand of bloodletting and set free the earth from pain. Rejoice, King Michael.”
Michael whispered, but David called out the words for everyone to hear. “He says: I have been first and I have been last. I have lived the sort of life that any man would want to live.” David clutched his sword approvingly. “Those are good last words. I will give you the easiest death. Mercy,” he said again, this time speaking it over everyone in the crowd. An attendant gave him an ax. He had put down the sword.
John didn’t watch the beheading. He heard the thud of the head as it rolled onto the stage. The crowd yelled. When he looked back, Michael’s body emptied its blood out onto the ground, for some time, gushing and gushing, and David leaned on the ax handle and gazed into the distance.
John turned to Tygo. He had decided he would travel with Tygo to Kansas. They would meet the Mystagogue together. They would tell him what they had seen. “We should go,” he said.
“We have to get David to come back with us.”
“He’s a lunatic. The True King is a lunatic. We must leave him.”
Then he saw David pike Michael’s head. He thought he would have been sick, but instead he watched it all. The head. The people. The stage. The sky.
* * *
John D. Sousa stood with Mizar and Tygo before his carriage, full again of all the uncertainty that had plagued him for his entire life. He was, after all, descended from a line of Chief Orbital Doctors and Astronomers and courtiers and fools. He had lived his life inside the geometry of his astrological charts. Now he had no guide except Tygo, who was only a man, fickle and lying, and yet John was
