“Sorry, Niamh,” he said contritely, shaking head and shoulders and letting the dream go. “Maybe it was just a sending from the fae.”
Who weren’t all kindly, he knew, particularly those from the wildwood. Looking around grounded him; he’d slept in this room ever since he stopped using a pallet in his mother’s. It had a cluttered look and a lot of souvenirs; there was his baseball bat and glove—he’d been first baseman for the Dun Juniper Ravens Little League team as a kid—and the images of the Lord and Lady over the hearth he’d carved when he wasn’t much older.
A shelf was stuffed with his books and ones he had out from the dun’s library. A stand in the corner held his armor and weapons.
The blanket was of his mother’s weaving, done while he was a captive of the Association in the War of the Eye, a bit worn now but still beautiful with its subtle pattern of undyed wool in shades of white and brown and gray. He smoothed it and lay back.
“What was it, then?” she said, yawning and laying her head on his shoulder. “A sending? Or just a dream?”
“It’s never just a dream,” he said. “But . . . you know how it is.”
She nodded. There were dreams, and then again there were dreams, and deciding which meant what was as important as it was difficult.
“On the whole, I think it was the Powers telling me to get my shoulder to the wheel and my arse in gear.” He sighed.
“Oh,” she said. Then: “Something to do with that cowan Ingolf?”
His mouth quirked in the candlelit dimness; cowan was a term for those who didn’t follow the Old Religion . . . and not an altogether polite one, either.
“So much for secrecy. Yes, but don’t ask me anything more about it . . . yeeep!”
“Anatomy. I’m just studying anatomy.”
* * * *
Castle Todenangst, Willamette Valley
Near Newberg, Oregon
January 14, CY22/2021 A.D.
“Yes, I gave them hospitality in Gervais,” the dowager baroness of that holding said, glaring at the three faces across the broad malachite table from her. “Why shouldn’t I?”
She was a gaunt woman with gray streaks in her blond hair; Sandra thought the green silk of her long cotte-hardi dress went badly with her rather sallow complexion.
The Lady Regent of the Portland Protective Asso ciation answered calmly: “Why? Because it would have made me look very bad if it came out that a noblewoman of the Protectorate had done that, particularly if this man they attacked had been killed . . . and our own children were there. Questions raised in the Lords. Questions raised in Corvallis at the next Meeting. Embarrassment, fines laid on the whole Association . . .I do not like being embarrassed, Mary. Do you understand?”
Sandra was an unexceptional woman in her fifties, pe tite and round-faced. Her stare could still make others flinch; it did now.
“I understand, my lady regent.”
“Good. Then don’t let it happen again. You have my leave to go. In proper form, Mary,” she said.
The baroness halted, made a sardonically precise curtsy that bowed her head just a hair more than manners required, and stalked out.
Sandra steepled her small elegant fingers and cocked her head a little, looking at the door through which Mary Liu had just gone in high dudgeon. It was massive, of light-colored oak over a solid steel core, and Liu hadn’t been able to slam it, which must have annoyed her no end.
“Do you know the problem with the Dowager Baroness Gervais?” the Lady Regent asked.
Conrad Renfrew, Count of Odell, took a walnut out of the bowl on the table between them and cracked it between finger and thumb, tossed the nut meat into his mouth and thought for a moment while he chewed.
“Is the problem that she’s an evil, murderous, spiteful bitch who’s conspiring with these assassins from the cow country?” he replied meditatively.
He was a thickset man in his fifties who’d always been built like a fireplug and had put on a little solid flesh lately. He wore casual-formal dress, a wide-sleeved shirt of snowy linen beneath a brown T tunic cinched with a studded sword belt, and loose breeches tucked into half boots; a heraldic shield on the tunic’s chest held his arms—sable, a snow-topped mountain argent and vert. His face was hideous with old white keloid scars, his eyes blue under grizzled brows, and his head as bare as an egg with less need of the razor he’d used in his youth.
“No, that’s not the problem,” Sandra said, toying with one of the trails of her silk wimple.
“She’s a stupid, evil, murderous, spiteful woman who can’t even speak a simple English sentence without translating it into High Formal Bitch?”
“No, she’s bright enough. What she lacks is self knowledge. I, for example, am fully aware of the fact that I’m an evil, murderous, spiteful bitch. And that I like it that way. Mary Liu just thinks she’s hard done-by and never given her due and has to stand up for her rights in a hostile, unfeeling world. And her habit of self-delusion leads her to do things that are quite unwise. Attempt ing to deceive me about helping this Prophet fellow, for example. If I said, ‘Mary, darling, as one evil bitch to another—don’t . . .’ Why, she’d be quite insulted.”
All three of the nobles sitting about the table in the presence chamber chuckled. It was in the Silver Tower, sheathed outside with pearly granite originally stripped from banks in Portland and Vancouver when Castle Todenangst was built by the Lord Protector’s architects and labor gangs in the second and third Change Years.
That color scheme continued within: white marble floors, light silk hangings, elegantly spindly furniture of pale natural woods or antiques salvaged from mansions and museums in the dead cities, only the rugs providing a blaze of hot color. A workshop in Newberg had spent two decades rediscovering the secrets of Isfahan and Tabriz carpets, but with modern themes: local wildflowers, hawks among trees and tigers creeping through reed beds beside the Willamette.
The air smelled slightly of jasmine and sandalwood; the closed windows kept the noise of the great fortress palace and the cold bright January day at bay, leaving only the slight hissing of the gaslights and an occasional gurgle from the recessed hot-water radiators behind their screens carved with scenes from Le Morte d’Arthur.
Conrad of Odell cracked another nut, dropping the shells into a Venetian-glass bowl.
“Stop showing off, Conrad,” the third person said. “So you can still crack walnuts with your fingers. So what?”
She put one on a ceramic coaster and tapped it open with the plain brass pommel of her dagger; the two halves of the shell fell neatly apart. Then she continued: “Big fat hairy . . . hairless . . . deal. You’re Lord Chancel lor now, and I’m the new Grand Constable. Breaking things is my job, and the method doesn’t matter as long as the job gets done.”
Tiphaine d’Ath—Baroness d’Ath in her own right, very unusually for a woman in the territories of the Port land Protective Association—was the youngest present by fifteen years, which put her in her mid-thirties.
In contrast to Lady Sandra’s headdress and long skirted cotte-hardi of pale silk and dazzling white linen, she wore male garb; in her case, black silk and velvet, with arms of sable, a delta or over a V argent in the he raldic shield on her chest. Her face was calm, as it usually was: strong-boned, with pale gray eyes and hair so fair it would take a long while for the first gray strands to show, worn in what another age would have called a pageboy bob. She was tall for a woman, just under five ten, built with compact long-limbed grace. Some people called the Regent the Spider. They called her hench-woman Lady Death, in a pun on her title.
Nobody laughed. It wasn’t that sort of joke.
“I’m not spiteful, in any case. Murderous, evil and a bitch, yes; spiteful, no,” Tiphaine added, taking a sip at her glass of wine after eating the nut.
“Some would say a duel a month for six months shows a certain amount of spite,” Renfrew said, smiling; she’d been his protégé too, if not for so long as she had been Sandra’s. “Part
icularly since you cut them to ribbons and they died by inches, screaming. Quite a performance; you couldn’t have done better with a dungeon and its entire staff. Fulk De Wasco looked like he was naked and nailed to the floor even while he still had his sword.”
“No, that was policy, not just fun. If Lady Sandra wanted me as Grand Constable, since I’m a woman I had to kill some of the more inveterate assholes, and in a way that would intimidate the others. A sword through the throat doesn’t scare them enough; they’re mostly too stupid to be cowards. Doing a little prelimi nary carving and trimming around the edges does give them pause for reflection at the closed-casket funeral, for some reason.”
“Everyone knew you were good with a blade,” Ren frew said. “Even Norman realized that, and he wasn’t what you’d call the equal-opportunity type.”
“He was smart enough to believe his eyes, when he didn’t let his obsessions get in the way. With some people you need to use visual aids to make a point. I’m still a freak of nature, but I’m a freak they don’t dare to diss.”
A long-haired Persian cat jumped up on the table. Tiphaine dumped it unceremoniously down; Sandra smiled slightly.
She wouldn’t have dared to do that once, she thought, tucking a lock of her graying brown hair back under her headdress; the silver-and-platinum band around it chinked softly.
Aloud: “Isn’t it interesting that this Prophet fellow was prepared to send assassins all the way to Mackenzie country? And isn’t it even more interesting that they knew this Vogeler was heading there? What do we know about these people? Refresh my memory; I’ve had more pressing business lately.”
“It’s a father-son team running a cult,” Tiphaine said, speaking without consulting the notes in the folders be fore her. “Our sources aren’t certain if the son is natural, or adoptive and the natural son of the woman who ran the cult before the Change.”
“The Church Universal and Triumphant, yes?”
“Yes, my lady. Generally known as the Cutters, or at least their musclemen are, or the Corwinites, from their headquarters. It’s in the country just north of the old Yellowstone National Park. They were there before the Change, and already had a couple of rungs missing from their ladders if you ask me, but the Prophet moved in and took them over with a group of followers in late ’ninety eight and added a lot of new stuff.”
“He’s not native there?”
“Rumor has it he was in California on the day of the Change itself. He’d been blowing up scientists in the eighties and nineties—had a major hate on for technology—and he was in jail in Sacramento. He escaped in the confusion, felt that God had personally answered his requests with the Change, and headed for Montana. That he got there does say something about his survival skills.”
They all nodded thoughtfully; California had been a charnel house as bad as anywhere on the globe, that day when the lights went out . . . and the water stopped coming through the pipes that kept nearly two-score million alive in a natural desert. Not one in a thousand had lived through it, the ones who’d run early and fast; reports said there were places where the desiccated corpses still lay three deep on the edges of the Mohave, despite a generation of sun and wind and crows and coyotes.
Dead as LA, went the proverb.
Tiphaine went on: “The new management of the CUT started small just after the Change, but they’ve been expanding recently, both by straightforward conquest and by conversion; they cover most of what was Montana by now, and chunks elsewhere. If they take over you con vert or die, so it snowballs. I’ve looked into the theology. They’re . . .”
Her tone remained flatly unemotional as she paused for a moment to search for the appropriate phrase and then resumed: “. . . mad as Tom O’Bedlam. Living on a different planet. Fucking bughouse nuts.”
“Yes, I’ve perused it a bit, too,” Sandra said. “Even stranger than the late unlamented Pope Leo here. Sort of a mishmash of Christianity and Buddhism and every lunatic and charlatan from Madame Blavatsky on, with an explanation of why God sent the Change, too—floods having been tried before, as it were. And they’re getting uncomfortably close, if they win this war with New Deseret. I wish we had access to this easterner Vogeler who was involved. The Mackenzies didn’t exactly brief Mathilda on it.”
Conrad’s brows went up; when the scars on his face moved, he looked more like a gargoyle than ever. “The CUT are a bit far away to worry about, surely?”
“That’s the time to worry. Knowledge is power. And now that we’ve absorbed the Palouse—”
“The western half of it,” Tiphaine said, with pedantic accuracy.
“—there’s only Boise and Deseret between us and them.”
Conrad shrugged massive shoulders. “You’re the sovereign. They’re basically a bunch of sheep shaggers, though. And they think anything with gears in it is sacrilegious, don’t they?”
“Yes, but you should read more widely in history, dear Conrad. There are any number of cults which’ve caused no end of trouble, though their first followers were few and poor. Especially when they preach salvation at the sword’s edge. In the event of trouble, how are we placed?”
She knew most of the answer, but it never hurt to go over the facts again. Conrad’s blue eyes took on a slightly abstracted look. He’d been an accountant by trade before the Change, as well as a fellow member of the Society for Creative Anachronism and a close friend of Norman and Sandra Arminger.
“The treasury’s got a full year’s revenue on hand in cash, our paper is trading at par and we can borrow at excellent rates if we have to—the customs and excise taxes are blossoming nicely with the way trade’s picked up. It would be even better if it weren’t for the Haida raiders and plain-and-simple pirate scum all over the Pacific basin.”
“The pirates we’ll have to leave to the naval powers like Tasmania, but for the Haida we need a Warden of the Coast. But who to appoint Marchwarden? Piotr has the most lands in that direction, but . . .”
“But I wouldn’t appoint him to supervise an orgy at the Slut and Brew,” Conrad said.
Tiphaine nodded. “There’s Juhel Strangeways, Lord de Netarts. He’s competent, and even fairly honest. And he already has County Tillamook in ward, for Lady Anne. It’ll be—”
“Five years until she reaches her majority,” the regent said.
“By then, he could have the place organized. He already dealt with that Haida raid, October before last.”
“A matter in which our Rudi had a hand,” Sandra said thoughtfully, stroking the cat in her lap. “He attracts trouble as sparks fly upward, that boy.”
“Coincidence?” Conrad rumbled.
“I’m far too paranoid to believe in coincidence, Count Odell.”
The other two smiled. “Neither do I,” the man said, and Tiphaine nodded. “De Netarts, for Marchwarden of the West, then?”
Sandra nodded, and he went on: “The basic mesne tithes are coming in without too much trouble as well; it’s easier now that we don’t have to split them with the Church.”
Sandra smiled like a cat. That had been one of the many reasons she’d unobtrusively arranged for Pope Leo to shuffle off his mortal coil, and for Portland’s Church to be reunited with Rome—or rather with the Umbrian hill-town of Badia, which was where the Swiss Guard had escorted the remnant of the Vatican when Rome went under.
Poor Norman, he did so want a pope of his own in true medieval style, and Bishop Rule was just the sort of madman to suit the role, once he’d decided that God considered everything since about June 15, 1297, a mis take. Of course, the Change was some evidence for that . . . on the whole, though, Pope Log is preferable to Pope Stork.
Despite the occasional tussle with Benedict and his successor Pius XIII over things like the nomination of bishops, and despite how useful a tame inquisition had been. One sane pope six months away was far easier to deal with than an all-too-active lunatic in Portland, and it had made reconciliation of a sort possible with Mount Angel and the other so called Free
Catholic bishoprics. Mount Angel’s mutant order of warrior Benedictines was becoming uncomfortably influential, through its budding university and with its daughter settlements helping the more badly battered areas get on their feet again.
Stalin had meant mockery when he asked how many divisions the pope had, but in the end his bewildered successors had found it didn’t matter; and men at arms and castles could come into the same category. At sev enth and last men were ruled from within their heads by ideas as much as by clubs from without, and a careful ruler kept it in mind. The Church of Rome had outlasted any number of systems that looked stronger than iron at the time, and had ridden out many storms that claimed to be the wave of the future; she was wise with years, and infinitely patient, and bided her time.
Best to take advantage of that, for herself and her daughter and her daughter’s children to come, rather than trying to build dams against it.
Conrad nodded, as if reading her mind. “We’re mak ing a mint off the salt-works on the coast and the Columbia tolls, too. Basic population has more than recovered from all those laborers who left after the Protector’s war.”
They both scowled slightly; of all the conditions im posed after the Portland Protective Association’s quali fied sort of defeat in what everyone else called the War of the Eye, the one allowing peons to leave without pay ing their unpayable debts had hurt hardest. Everyone had a lot more land than farmers to till it, even now. Peo ple were wealth in the most fundamental sense, strong hands and backs to work and fight.
“Between natural increase and immigration from the more chaotic areas like Pendleton, which unfortunately goes to the other realms as well as to us, and the fifty thousand left in the Palouse when we annexed it—”
Sandra smiled her cat smile, and Tiphaine d’Ath nodded, and Renfrew grinned. It had even been voluntary.
At least, it was voluntary on the part of the collection of sheriffs and strong-arm types who took over there after the Change, she thought. And their sons.
They’d been unable to compose their own feuds—not least because of the Association’s subtle pot-stirring—and had been left in the end with a choice between the neofeudalism of the PPA and the iron-fisted centralized autocracy of the United States of Boise under General President Thurston. Now the Free Cities of the Yakima League were surrounded by Protectorate territory on three sides, too, and could be squeezed, as long as she was subtle and indirect about it.