Her sun-freckled face lit up like the sun. “He’s going to rescue us from the captain. Me, you, and the Impii. We’re going to the other side of the sea where we’ll never have to see him again.”
“Tell him when,” Ba’al added.
“Soon. Very soon.”
Adam did not reply. He couldn’t. His tongue was dumb and his head beating like an Impii drum from a time when Babylon was still a living city, a time when he knew what was truth and what was falsehood. He needed clarity, yet every experience since his old world ended had become thoroughly blurred to the point of obscurity. His own memories seemed absurd to him now compared to those words he yearned to believe. He twisted his head to glance at Magdalynn and felt the sting of the raw scar, his last lucid memory.
“You marked us as slaves,” he said to the bishop and pointed to the brand on the right of his neck.
Ba’al cocked his head, excited, and said, “Did I? I can’t blame you for thinking so. Not after what you’ve been through. But if you believe that brand makes you a slave, think again.” He grabbed the bottom of his scarlet shirt, untucked it from his trousers, and exposed his chest: lean and hairless with a scar on his right breast identical to Adam’s and Adnihilo’s. “It’s the Crest of the King,” Ba’al explained. “It’s to keep us safe from Venicci’s ilk. You see, he’s made pacts with the Devil and can influence a man’s soul—if it’s unprotected, that is.”
“You were serious, then, when you said that you were…” The pastor’s son couldn’t finish the sentence.
“Possessed?” answered the bishop. The very notion was ridiculous.
Is it, though? How else to describe the smuggler’s evil than demonic? Who else but the devil would massacre a church?
Ba’al replaced his shirt. “Yes. I’ve been held to that villain’s whim for some time now. Met him on the docks while I was on mission at our Gautaman chapel. I didn’t know what happened until after he had me, but by then it was too late. He bewitched me into hiring his ship and hooked me deeper with opium. Speaking of,” Ba’al reached beside his stool and took up a lamp and pipe, filled the bowl with a dark, pungent tar, and with a set of pinions he sparked the lamp and began huffing clouds of bone-white smoke. “You’ll excuse the habit. The Crest can keep a man safe in spiritual matters, but poppies are a mortal vice.” He sucked again on the end of his pipe and exhaled, staring glossy-eyed through a veil of white fog. “So, are you ready to hear my proposition yet?”
Adam opened his mouth and choked on the smoke, chased it down with wine. Do I believe it? he asked himself. Even with the brand for evidence, Adam found the tale hard to digest. It was too incredible; it left too many questions. Yet if it would save him and Adnihilo and Magdalynn, didn’t that make it true enough? It’s the best chance I’ve got. He nodded for the clergyman to continue.
Through thick opiate mist, Bishop Ba’al whispered, “I want you to help me kill Venicci. The time and place are being arranged as we speak, we’re just waiting on our man to give the signal. This is your chance. You could put an end to that degenerate, purge him from the world with your father’s sword. You could be a saviour. The girl has told me what you promised her, Adam. This is your chance to make it come true.”
†
I’ll do it, thought the pastor’s son, rocking with the waves and the sway of his hammock. He’d sequestered himself below deck after departing the captain’s cabin; and there he stayed, suspended, cradled in itchy cloth while the hours of the day became the hours of the evening, David’s sword pressed close to his heart. The weight of it calmed him, kept the shaking at bay as he prayed to the Lord for strength. Sometimes, when he whispered the words aloud, he felt his raw brand rub against the canvas and he recalled what the bishop had said.
It was the Crest of Kings, of Lord of lords, of their holy God crowned on his Jasper Throne in Heaven. During his seclusion in the belly of the carrack, Adam had finally remembered the early scriptures where such a mark was described whose like was never recorded but whose meaning was divine: a secret sign known only through revelation and shown only in history to the ancient Tsaazaari kings—Messai’s great forerunners from before the conqueror saints.
And if it is the Crest, truly, he contemplated, then who is this bishop? What does it mean for me?
The only way to know was to kill Venicci, free himself and the others and all of the smuggler’s future slaves. He hugged the sword tighter to his chest, squeezed his eyes shut till, dreaming, he imagined the yellow-orange glow of Babylon. Only, it was not the light of the city ablaze, just the flames of the hearth and of the candles placed about David’s cell. They were warm, those flames. They were exactly as Adam remembered them from when he was young enough to sit on his father’s lap and listen as he read from one of the hundred tomes shelved within the office. Gone. Burned to the ground. Yet there they were all around him, books transcribed and bound by the hands of a retired soldier, a blanketed plank bed, a rocking chair brought from somewhere across the ocean with the half-finished quilt folded upon its seat.
He looked around for his father, but it was only Adam rocking in the chair and Magdalynn sitting on his knee. He was reading to her of the Witch of Spring and the Winter Wolf, of Mother Merihem and her pagan children who were lured into the north-western woods where they became
