2.25. Vivat a Legia Aeterna

The music played. Thundering drums the size of oxen hammered by severe soldiers in spiked helms and frogged field coats. Complex curlicued brass instruments poured forth a fusillade of triumphal sound. Ofelia had not been joking about the bassoons. They were the size of fucking cannons and blared their deep-ocean heaviness.

Tiago rode on the carriage’s flank, his shining boot planted on the booth step and his crisp black riding glove looped into an ulnar handhold on its side. “Get ready,” he yelled over the music. “You’re in the splash zone.”

“The what?” Seth asked, and then realized what Tiago meant. He tucked his chin.

Lisa unsheathed her sword.

The brilliant banner of foaming red that it released, in all Seth’s months of bearing witness, had brought forth gasps and yelps and sounds of dismay muffled by coarse-spun sleeves. Never to thunderous applause; never until now. The city was alive and the city was as ravenous for the imported gore as the imported glory.

Seth felt the hot droplets of the preservative blood that pumped through it on the back of his neck. He smeared them away and examined his hand. This smear of red had joined the green Legion sash as the only color on him.

Ahead of them, Rafi held his own gory blade up, to similarly raucous reception. Behind them, Larson a’Lauvey drew his, with an overenthusiastic yank that scythe-bladed the blood outward into the crowd. The crow-clad bachelorette it painted red didn’t seem to mind; she whooped wildly and jumped up and down, her bustier showing through the low cut of her coatee.

Seth remembered what the twins had told him of lit life in the city, how eager the competition was to snuff your wick. Sleeping with an ensouled Verdugo would surely be the grandest prize of them all.

They’d crossed the bridge now, past towering precipices of polished stone decorated with statues of heroes and halberdiers whose carved musculature bulged in confederate determination to hold up the woven threads of galvanized steel suspension that anchored the paved road above its murky moat.

Around their heads and higher up, in windows forty vertiginous floors above the water, flylamps burned, burnishing the gleaming banisters into a pallid caramel wash. The unlit swarmed and cheered and hurled great armfuls of black-and-white confetti. A festival in monochrome.

Flechette festivity came cutting down through the green air in starling drifts. Some the petals of a greenhouse’s worth of flowers; some was paper. Confetti, yes, but between the milled-for-purpose stuff was ledger paper and broadsheet and old bills, whatever the offices had going spare, dumped by the armful into the updraft off the river. It caught the light. It went into Seth’s collar and his hair and the horses’ manes, and Draco tossed his head and did not break stride, because Draco had done this eleven times before.

A crisp, floral taste suddenly dried the center of Seth’s mouth. He coughed to dislodge it from his soft palate and a crumpled flower petal landed in his palm. Ahead of them, Rafi wagged a finger. He cried something over the cacophony that reached Seth in snatches: “I told you, Mr. il Gutierre! Mouth shut!”

The landmarks were coming into view now. The glow of the psychelith cut itself from the sky in jagged facets lit from within by millions—millions, Saints help us—of disembodied souls. With a pair of infuser’s goggles, perhaps you could even see them—the invisible strings that linked the people to the souls that swam within life-preserving crystal goliath like a woven skein laid across the city.

And the Bastion. Their destination. Built in brutalist simplicity centuries ago at the broken rim of a crag over the North Delta, the seed of a black-bricked metropolis that had bloomed upward to meet it and cover it in a megaregurgitation of every fine artist’s magnum opus from across a terrified and grateful continent, like an ancient hull crusted with barnacles or an underwater volcano whose layers of magma had formed a breaching island, until the ugly blocks of the original fort had been buried in an intricate reef of flying buttresses and ribbed vaults and towering traceries and boss stones filigreed with this Saint or that one and reliquary spires and criss-crossing transepts like an asterisk or a star of granite, now steepled with pointed pinnacles whose tympana were so crowded with antique warriors and leering skulls and gargoyles and shrieking grotesques that the eye whirlpooled to behold it, that the shield borne by a bold legionnaire upon a carved relief battlefield had within its compass, as if painted on the wood, another battlefield, with more scenes of heroic bloodshed upon it with details matching the first into unthinkable minutiae, into a fractal infinity whose depth was primordial, whose stone developed a life beyond and before and supplanting the life that had built it and lived in its shadow, eternal and undying and glaring down upon its witnesses as if to say: All you who perish and flow through the Turning Wheel, all flesh fails, all breath fades. But not the Legion. Vivat a Nekropoli. Vivat a Legia Aeterna.

At the very crest of the Necropolis’s peregrine mausoleums, that world-cracking flash of green came again. This close it was not a lightning bolt but a universal blink, inverted from the mind’s murky black to the soul’s brilliant emerald. Its casting strobed the street in brilliant neon, sent every shadow leaping back, and a simian backwater in Seth’s brain froze over in preparation for the thunder, but none came, just a low tuneful thrum in bipart, like the massive slow lub-dub of a metropolis-sized heart fit to keep the world beating.

Which it is, Seth suddenly understood, with fearful veneration. Which it does. The energy of thousands upon thousands of deaths from across the continent, riding the rails to the Necropolis, feeding the Legion who blistered the sky all the way back with the returning obituary pulse. A permanent death-engine within a vault of towering stone-and-steel ribs, pumping countless oblivions across a continent frozen at the threshold of what ought to have been its own oblivion in turn brought by millions of gnashing maws and tearing claws.

It was one thing to know it. To see it turned him impossibly small. A mote of dust blown from the surface of the world by the cosmic wind, swirled in the eddies of the passage of some incomprehensible titanic something. If he hadn’t had one already, he’d have needed to find a seat.

And this is your reason now. Fueling the deathspell. This is what you will spend the rest of your life in service to.

Lisa grinned and nudged him with her knee, as if mistaking his existential dread for excited awe. And perhaps that’s what it was. Not since his own unlighting had he been called upon to contain such an emotion, one too large and unnameable to fit inside him.

No, he decided, daring to look again at the horrible beauty of the bewitched sky. That isn’t what your life is for. That’s not what you serve after all. She is.

On balance, that actually made him feel a lot better.

“You can’t tell because they’re all cheering for us,” Tiago said. “But there is a certain sort of Necropolitan who cheers every time that flash happens, every two hours, and it’s fucking annoying.”

Ofelia picked a petal from the felt trench of her bicorne. “You stop hearing it eventually.”

Seth leaned over his shoulder to the carriage’s front window and gave it a soft knock. “You don’t have to come out,” he said. “But these people are cheering for the saviors of the continent, and that includes you.”

The curtain twitched. Riccana’s drawn face was visible in its dark interior. “That’s nice of you to say.”

“Also,” Seth said. “Tiago’s had his hat on backwards for five minutes and hasn’t noticed.”

A pause. The curtain moved another half-inch. “It is on backwards.”

“It’s shameful. Somebody should tell him.”

“No,” Riccana said. “Let him find out in the papers.”

The carriages didn’t divert on their straightaway path to the Bastion. The colossal front gate’s portcullis roared upward to receive them, and then the wide double-doors beyond them, and then into the vast echoing marble transepts of the fortress itself, tracking the mire of the roads and the billowing curtains of confetti they had steered through, scattering grit and flowers across the polished mosaic floors.

The star-shaped heart of the bastion—the space it had been during the first Emergence, before the war with the seraphs was wrongly seen as won—had been hollowed out and turned into one cavernous chamber, its ceiling vaulted and splashed across with a mural that famously displayed every last Saint of the Hundred doing battle on a windswept cliff with the prototypical seraphim, casting them from the rocks into the ocean.

There were, in actuality, a hundred and twelve saints—but The Hundred was a far more portentious title, and nobody paid much heed to the second-stringers these days anyway. Saint Loreli of the Gleaming Brook had, presumably, been much more important before they’d invented sewers. And the seraphs they fought were far less hideous than the abominations Seth had encountered. They were still combinations of man and beast, still feathered and furious, but they had an otherworldly grace to them. Beauty, even. Whoever did this never saw a seraph, he thought, and then remembered what the al Ydrises had told him, how every death a seraph returned from twisted them further and further into monstrosity.

You could stack twenty Seths on one another’s shoulders and the topmost thief’s fingertips would still not reach that ceiling. In the yawning space between its tableau and the Verdugos who now ringed their carriages were three tiers of balcony, each narrower and more ornamental as they rose in proscenium splendor, each packed with Exarks in Legion finery. Their applause was so thick it created the same sort of unified whoosh Seth had heard on the bridge, but it lacked the bass lent by the massed voices. The raucous celebration outside still reached them, muffled like thunder, but the laudation in these walls was colder and more precise.

Lisa’s dazzling smile remained unchanged. Thirty still seconds passed, and she and Rafi made victorious statues of themselves, swords held aloft. Larson attempted the same thing but his arm was shaking, and the transference along it from flesh to steel sword exaggerated the motion.

Rafi’s trembly coachman Malark stood in his seat and the applause abruptly died, like a needle lifted from its wax canister. “Praise the Sorcerer General!” he announced, in a startlingly rich and heavy voice. “Praise the Deathspell beneath which he shelters us!”

“Praise the Verdugo,” the gallery cried in response, and the words were hardly audible in the torrential echo their voices bounced around the Bastion. Malark sat back down and cracked his reins, and Rafi’s retinue rolled forth.

“Go,” Tiago said by Seth’s ear. “Follow him.”

Seth spurred Draco and Draka into action, and the carriage lumbered out from the main chamber and through another wrought iron gate, into the guts of the Bastion.

They descended a ramp; with every rotation of their wheels the smell of straw and horse grew stronger, and their passage eventually terminated in a stable whose utilitarian trappings were far more recognizable to Seth’s provincial mind than the splendor he’d seen above. They were guided to a berth; the horses were freed from their yokes; the retinues unloaded, stretched themselves, and picked residual confetti off their black cloaks. Tiago turned his hat around with displeasure.

Seth offered his arm to Lisa. “Shall we, Madam Verdugo?”

She smiled, and took it, but did not depart the compass of the carriage. Instead she rapped her knuckles on its door. “Riccana, my dear. Would you mind terribly if Seth and I borrowed this interior briefly?”

The door opened and the unlit girl within peered out gloomily. Riccana was dressed in the same stern black as Seth, without the benefit of the green Legion sash. “Where should I go?”

“If you accompany my children, they’ll fend off any attempts at conversation.” Lisa held the door for Riccana to exit. “The food at this reception is uniformly delicious. Please take advantage.”

Tiago extended a hand to help Riccana down the steps. He caught himself in the automatic motion about halfway up the way, but by then it was too late to return his hand to his side so it just stayed lamely up on offer.

Riccana took it, held it for the few steps down to the floor, and released it with a small “Thank you.”

“You’re—” Tiago’s voice hit an adolescent rupture. He cleared his throat. “You’re quite welcome.”

For the first time since she’d arrived at the Necropolis, Riccana smiled. “Nice crack.”

Tiago’s cheeks went from paperwhite to cloudy gray. “It’s this semipermanent puberty. I unlit too damn early. You’re lucky—”

He halted like a panicky yank on the reins.

Riccana, if she was gotten to, did not let it show. “Your mom says there’s food?”

“Yes.” Tiago abruptly reanimated. “Come on, Feeli.” He stabbed a finger at her. “And don’t say a saintfucking word.”

“What would I even say?” Ofelia asked, the picture of politeness.

“Nothing. That’s my point.”

An unyielding pressure landed on Seth’s arm. He turned into the heavily lidded eyes of Lisa al Ydris.

“We didn’t have much time this morning, did we?” she said. “A lot to be done.”

“Time for what?”

“For us to have a little conversation, Seth.” Her fingers curled in. He felt the crescent of her nails. “The last time I spoke to you with this mouth, do you remember what I said?”

He certainly did. As lovely as his life had become, it was hard to forget. “It could have been so wonderful, Seth.”

She gave his recollection a small, strange smile. “Very good.”

“Are you…” He did his best to read her, but the open book that was Annalise had closed. “Are you angry?”

“I thought I might be.” She studied him as he studied her, tracing the line of his jaw like it was a route on a map. “When I put this head on. I wondered how I would feel, once I saw you again. But no. No, Seth. I am not angry.”

The skin on his neck was prickling. “What are you, then?”

Her touch traveled up his arm and closed tightly around it. At the broadest point of his bicep, her hand was vast enough to encircle it, finger-to-thumb. “How about I show you,” she murmured.

She took him into the carriage, and closed the door behind them.