It was cold as the grave when Jezebel woke. She was bound and chained to a wooden stake in the shape of a cross, hanging by her wrists, her legs dangling over a bar of red and black sand. Beyond that lay naught but darkness: a black sky, an empty horizon, and a shallow sea still as ice—atop from which rose frozen fire—stygian stone surrounding the islet like the walls of the altars of towering Barzakh. And she was not alone.
For on those walls stood ten chimeric demons bearing seven bronze cups, a brass trumpet, an unfinished tapestry.
Brr-UMM! blasted the horn of a sickly, horse-headed thing as it ushered forth a beaked and gaunt grotesquery.
“Blood,” the demon crowed, swooping low on raven wings and emptying its chalice on the singer’s naked body.
Brr-UMM! she heard again, and, “Blood,” in another voice, but she hardly saw the vulture. Her eyes were aflutter in hot fluid running thick and sticky down her face and her neck and steaming on contact, so frigid was her skin when the vulture dumped its own cup.
Brr-UMM! then “Blood,” then thrice more again: a lion-breasted eagle, an owl-headed cavalryman. Next a lancer riding on his own four horse-legs. And last, a goat scholar and a charred-skinned seraphim whose molten eyes lingered longest; longing, sad and eager as he trickled the contents of his chalice onto Jezebel’s forehead.
He whispered to her, “Yes, your flesh will befit a queen.”
Then all was silence, and the very air became cold with an odor of iron and myrrh until at last a meticulous, elephantine spider finished spinning its tapestry. In the same breath, a phoenix-downed creature, bound and shackled, held high its lantern. No light shone from the candle—its flame was black as the obsidian walls—regardless, it alighted that devil among them as he rose from his throne of old, yellowed bones.
“Xanthos King,” they hailed with terror in their voices, in fear of the odious, cadaverous being: a thing of contorted, missorted skeletons tied with torn tendons and draped in sable wings. Its face and horns were those of a ram; its snout, a boar’s; and its eyes were like a goat’s, only deeper, darker, like tendrils winding around Jezebel’s neck—her breasts and her shoulders, her waist, then lower around her thighs and her ankles. Lastly, he gazed upon her face: her pale, quivering lips; her sniveling, running nose; her high, gaunt cheeks, and those eyes like black pearls in the foam of the ocean.
“Yes. You will serve. For now,” rasped the devil, and at once the walls closed in, and they were true flames then. Consuming, black, and cold.
Eighth Verse
Lord Austen Sylvertre tugged at the high collar of his jerkin and at the sky-blue sleeves of his doublet underneath. “Seems like an early winter, wouldn’t you say, Captain Gildmane?”
Sir Trey Gildmane twiddled a roll of parchment betwixt his fingers—the list of aspirants for the autumn Struggle, signed and sealed by the saint himself and delivered to the triad of judges waiting in wooden thrones at the center of the Valley Rock.
Trey yawned, “No, I wouldn’t say so, my lord. Perhaps your gentle blood is too thin for the morning chill?” He waited but got no response from the landless skylord, only labored breaths as Sylvertre tried to warm his hands, the white-elm sigil on the breast of his jerkin wrinkling and expanding. Gildmane was disappointed.
“Chill?” interjected Bishop Noblis Whitehand, shifting his onerous girth in the seat of his cathedra. “These are the death throes of summer, I say. I’ve not sweat this much since His Holiness’s anointment!” He began fanning himself with stubby, swollen fingers. “My cassock was drenched, I remember it quite well. It must have been hot as that witch we burned last eve.”
The corners of Trey mouth fell heavy. “You remember poorly, Whitehand. It was raining that day.”
“You were in attendance?” Lord Austen braved a question.
“I was knighted.”
“Yes, yes now I remember!” exclaimed the bishop, his cathedra creaking under his tremendous weight. “All that treachery and unprecedented ceremony, His Holiness raising that street rat. I still can’t fathom why.”
“That was quite a few years back,” noted the skylord. “Captain, you must have been a young man.”
A pressure weighed behind Gildmane’s eyes. He didn’t want to think about that day, yet nothing was clearer in his mind than the rain on the dais, Captain Acker and Warrior-Priest Normand, Bishop Cornelius and destitute Ba’al. They flashed before him: lies, prophecies, and a doleful bloodbath. He’d been all of fourteen and unprepared for his duty. Nearly a decade later, nothing had changed.
“It was nine years ago, my Lord,” answered Gildmane.
“Good God, you’d have been no older than my son.”
“Ogdon? I saw his name on the list. Does he have any experience?”
Austen flattened the chest of his jerkin, smoothing the silver leaves of his white-elm sigil. “He’s just finished a year of service. I had him page for my wife’s brother’s household guard at their manse just north-east of where Ward Aureus runs over the Serpent’s Tail. None of the men-at-arms there were ever blessed with accolades, sadly, so he’s been stuck between lordling and squire.”
Between babe and child, more like, the captain thought. Glorified farmers can’t raise up a knight.
Brr-UMM! blasted a war horn from atop the border of Valley Rock. The aspirants were approaching Ward Service, Pareo’s ancient inner wall. Trey watched the gatehouse—they all did, their conversation forgotten—eager to see which seven would finish first the three mile dash from the outer Ward Aureus. Seconds expired, a minute, then a shadow of a man passed under
