Blackheart swallowed hard and called Trey’s bluff. He stuttered, “Nice try, Gildmane, but Sir Godfrey warned me about your stunts. You can’t just throw me out of your own authority, not after I’ve been confirmed.”
“That’s right,” the captain smiled, snatching his axe from his hip. “Any last words?”
“You wouldn’t dare,” gasped Harold.
Charlotte opened the door.
Jael screamed. The axe fell.
Eleventh Verse
They were a month on the water when at last Adnihilo caught a glimpse of the lush Gautaman coast. At first, he didn’t believe it. He’d been watching the horizon a long time without sign of anything but ocean, so long that he thought he’d die on that boat. Yet he kept on watching; there was little else he could do. His left arm was dead below the shoulder—immobile, numb—and his skin littered with wormy scars. he tried not to look at them. His spirits were low enough without revisiting old wounds. Yet he did that, too—gaze into the waves and reflect on his failings: Jezebel in the church and outside with the pale knight, Adam with the smuggler and again with the pirates. I couldn’t even protect myself, he thought as a tingling needled his useless arm. Then he gazed again over the grand horizon. But I made a promise. Kill the boy.
Squeezing the hilt of his stolen sabre, he felt his blood rush to the rhythm of the waves. They beat the bow like a drum. He was coming into a new land, one of gaunt, twisted hills and broad forest lowlands where villages stood like fortresses above tiered moats of wetland—rice fields, if the bishop was to be believed, separated by frail thatch screens. But these were mere farms and homesteads. Where he and Adam and Magdalynn were going was something else, something out of a dream, the great city.
It rose one evening out of the sea. They were rounding the cape of Gautama, Adnihilo watching from atop the crow’s nest, when an islet appeared not far in the distance. And as their shipped turned north, he saw another, then another. There were more than twenty visible before the half-blood realized they were not islets at all but ships anchored together and docked along a floating pier. It was another hour before land appeared, and by then, they were in the thick of the cobweb harbor. Adnihilo never put down his sword, for there was no shortage of Gautaman spiders. Everywhere he looked were the black flags and sails of slavers and pirates. A few were merchant vessels, but these too put a fear in the half-blood. They were monstrous, dwarfing the carrack as they passed like a lion passes a mouse.
Then darkness fell, and the lights of the city outshone the sky. A thousand, thousand lanterns burned so bright that he could make out the short houses with their gabled, sweeping roofs, green as the mountain wilderness. The whole place seemed a palace to Adnihilo. Everywhere he looked were arched gates and clay statues of lions and hounds guarding multi-winged houses, gardens and courtyards, ponds and wells. And at the city’s center, wooden castles towered, their tiered, tiled roofs glowing golden, their walls bright red.
“We’re here!” gasped Adnihilo, breathless after dashing below deck and waking Adam and Magdalynn from their sleep.
At dawn, they finally departed the ship, abandoned it to the few remaining mutineers as payment for double crossing their captain. It felt odd having firm ground beneath them. The half-blood nearly tripped half a dozen times, as did his friends, and they smiled and japed about it together. The bishop, however, found less humor in it. He’d been that way since the night of the raid—weary, dark eyed, and pale—and his mood worsened after he exhausted his opium. That was days ago. Now, even a wrong look could raise Hell in him, and they were walking through a city more crowded than an ant mound.
“Come on. Can’t you walk any faster?” Ba’al spat at Adam. “I’m sick of looking at these slant-eyed pagans. The chapel is just up ahead. We unload there.”
The pastor’s son leaned a little longer on his crutch. It was a makeshift thing Magdalynn fashioned for him out of spare rope and barrel slats the day after the attack. Even after a month, he couldn’t walk without it, but the Messah didn’t whinge—said he considered himself lucky that with a wound so deep he didn’t lose his leg. Nothing, it seemed, could break Adam’s spirit. He took Ba’al’s heckling in stride and asked, “How long have we had a chapel in Gautama, Your Grace? Father always said it was too dangerous to send missionaries so far east.”
“A little less than a decade. Lucius sent one missionary before, but he never returned. Once Paul was anointed, we thought we might try again. My idea, truly. All of it: the expansion of the ecclesiastics, the peace with King Solomon, the Gautaman outreach. Cornelius hasn’t done a damned thing without my counsel.”
Adam hobbled alongside the bishop, eyes bright with curiosity. “How did you get so much influence over the saint? Is that what it’s like, being a bishop?”
Ba’al grinned, a razor smile that sent a chill down Adnihilo’s spine. “The saint doesn’t listen a damn to his clergymen. I’m a prophet, boy, and Paul damn well knows it.” The conversation paused, no one willing to contest the claim nor to believe it. Meanwhile, they arrived at the chapel, an unadorned structure of wood and whitewash, narrow, long, and taller than the surrounding Gautaman shopfronts, the Messaii cross looming atop its roof. Inside was almost barren: no pews, no transept, no altar, no chancel; just a rectangular room with cushions and a lectern, and a single flight of stairs leading up to a locked door.
“Where is everyone?” asked Adam.
The bishop dropped his pack. “Last
