2 Dono del Cielo (Gift of the Sky)
Moonday, Hare Moon 3
Yvette rolled a pair of crimson silk garters and set them in her vanity drawer.
“Are you going to dress while I watch?” Thorne’s gloomy tone suggested the thought appalled him.
“No.” She tried to ignore his grimace by gathering a pile of clothing off her bed and tossing it behind the privacy screen. “I didn’t expect you back so soon.”
“I thought you were interested in Laich’s progress.” The chair’s feet slid across the floor.
Wearing durable dark trousers and a matching doublet, Yvette emerged. “It’s done?”
“Laich is still working on your truth serum, but I brought something else you might be interested in.” Thorne stood and reached into his doublet. He pulled out a pistol and let its brass catch the light. Proudly he held the weapon up for Yvette.
It was her turn to look disappointed. “You expect one pistol to bring down a corrupt church?” She might have foolishly placed too much trust in the foreigners.
He smiled, undefeated by her assessment. “I understand why we keep Marcello alive, but if we can’t get him to reveal his crimes, I’d like assurance we can make him dead.” A confident grin swept his face. “Laich put fire into the pellets. We shot a few last night.” He slid the pistol back into his doublet and fixed the askew ruffle about his neck. “Let me show you.” He offered his hand, ever pretending to be a gentleman. Yvette snubbed the gesture though in truth, she found it charming. Laich’s engineered pellets were worth seeing.
Thorne opened the balcony door and ushered Yvette through. An iron grate, rusted with age, clung to the exterior of the brothel’s upper wall. Yvette started up and paused before she’d reached the eave. Bells clanged in the distance. Thorne drew in line with her and she caught his sleeve. “Wait.” Yvette turned her gaze east. “Nothing good ever happens when those bells ring.” She scurried down the grate and returned to her chamber.
The hallway door opened and Claudia, young madam of the institution and dressed in the scarlet silk of her trade, entered. “They rounded up a dozen savio from a divine temple near Edri,” she said. “It’s a heresy sanction.”
The seat of Radan power rarely interfered in Kanassa, but it appeared Kanassa had no similar discretion—or at least Marcello didn’t. “He’s carrying it out in public?” Yvette asked, after noting signs of distress on Claudia’s porcelain face.
“The streets are already busy,” Claudia said. “He’s going to set an example with them.”
Yvette crawled over her bed and reached down the side, between mattress and wall. “Then we need to set an example of our own. Are you coming like that? Get dressed.”
“I imagine with everyone at the cathedral, the jail is less protected.” Claudia unlaced her bodice and Thorne averted his eyes as she stripped off articles of silk and donned functional garb. “I may even be able to walk right in and take Vincenzo.”
“No,” Yvette said, pulling her bow from under her bed. “We go to the cathedral first—to ruin His Eminence’s unjust trial. After, you can split off and examine the prison. But don’t move until you’ve reported back here. No one goes in there until I command it.”
Some inner thought pulled Claudia’s demure features into a sly grin. At the age of twenty-seven, she proved wise beyond her years, and Yvette felt a touch responsible for that—but only a touch. “Which set of priests are you bringing your bow for?” Claudia asked.
“I’ll see when we get there,” Yvette said. “Thorne, stow the iron somewhere.” Yvette extricated her quiver from a rolled tapestry.
“I’m not letting it out of my sight.”
Defiance? Wondering at the conflict on his face, Yvette opened her vanity drawer, revealing a false bottom. “We haven’t time for debate. This is as secure a place as any.”
After a moment to consider, Thorne grabbed a pair of linen underpants and wrapped the pistol, tucking it under a disguising layer of lacy underthings.
Claudia, wearing a worn old shirt from Yvette’s drawer, tugged her bow and quiver from behind the wardrobe and threw a cloak over her shoulders. “Ready?” Yvette pulled up her hood and tossed a case of quarrels to Thorne.
He caught it. “What are these for?”
Yvette slid a crossbow from under the bed. “You know how to use this?”
Thorne frowned and took it from her grasp. “I’m a fair shot.”
“Good,” Yvette said, patting his arm. “You’ll have to fill Vincenzo’s place until we get him back.” Yvette followed Claudia, her dark-haired protégé, to the balcony door. “If we get separated, don’t either of you come back here until you’re sure you aren’t being followed.”
*
Rafe Venieri sat at his desk, surrounded by papers and bottles of ink. He glanced at the timepiece on the shelf. A cast bronze baby with a round belly and naked bottom lay draped atop the rounded clock face, its pudgy hand hanging down over the side, holding a rose. Bells rang at the cathedral. He loosened his cravat and pushed up his black velvet doublet sleeve.
Through his open office door, Rafe saw two old men leave their seats to peer through hand-blown glass, for what little good it did them. Rafe dipped his pen and tapped it, indifferent to the summons. He spent no more time within the walls of the haunted tomb than the law demanded, Sundays from nine to noon and Radan holidays. “I’ll take my religion in small doses,” he grumbled, drawing his quill over the paper.
A scrivener poked his head in the door. “Cancelliere Venieri?”
Rafe didn’t bother to look up. “Yes?” Twice in a month, the bells beckoned people to the square before the cathedral courtyard lined with guards. Both times, His Eminence, Lazaro Marcello, passed religious edicts. The first forbade anyone not baptized in the cathedral, becoming a senator. After angering a number of noble families, some of whom came from the divine-worshipping territories to the north, the decree was overturned. A battle His Excellency, Kanassa’s doge, won against the cleric overstepping his authority. The other edict, a fine for wearing red on Sundays, was still in effect. Rafe wasn’t bothered; he preferred somber tones.
“Signor, the bells.”
“Go if you wish.” Rafe dipped his pen. “I have things to do.” He didn’t say what he wanted tosay—that hearing the words of Rada disseminated through unholy lips was low on his list of priorities. When the scrivener left, Rafe blew his fresh ink, careful not to smudge it after he signed his name. He affixed a seal and pressed the hot wax with his carved amber chancery stamp. “Frederico,” he called his apprentice. “I need you to go to the courier.”
No one came.
Rafe headed into the main office. It was empty. On the desks, brushes lay, not even rinsed. Papers scattered the floor, blown from a desk when scribes left in haste. Rafe crouched to retrieve them. No sense leaving documents to be trod on and have to rewrite them.
Beyond the open door, a town crier passed among the throng in the street. “Injustice! Irreverence! Impiety!” His scraggly beard waggled when he shouted accusations, holding aloft a crinkled page. A missive, one of hundreds scattered throughout town, denouncing deification of the seven holy divines representing the phases of life—the child, the maiden and the hunter, the mother and the farmer, and the crone and the elder.
Preaching equality for all people, the Order of Divines gained support in Kanassa from the ever-growing middle class, especially patrician women. Not only did the Order of Divines accept women into their ranks, they were led by a single high priestess—the Lucinda, purported embodiment of peace and spiritual purity. She even appeared at the doge’s side when a Fjeran prince visited Kanassa from across the sea, for the winter Festival of Lights.
Despite the Radan Church’s insistence that deifying any human qualified as heresy, Kanassa’s citizens rejected the dissolution of their preferred faith.
People cheered, joining the crier in his chant. Rafe shielded his eyes with his hand as he stepped into the sunlit street. The chancery lay a quarter mile east of the cathedral, yet carriages blocked the road, mired by the sheer number of pedestrians. He had never seen so many people turn up for a religious speech. It looked more like an execution.
Rafe’s breath caught in his throat. He tossed his documents onto a nearby desk and closed the door of the chancery, locking it. Three and four-story buildings cast the late afternoon street into shadows. A young man stood above the foot traffic, arms wound around a cast iron lamppost while he shouted. “Idianna died for her husband, Rada, and he now charges us to show mercy to our fellow man, to all people. Where is His Holiness’ mercy now?”
Rafe’s answer came out a grumble. “The same place as every other virtue when it becomes unprofitable.” He hurried down the road, ever south.
Cast aside were class barriers as people flooded the streets. Women in kerchiefs and patched linen bodices stood next to nobles flanked by liveried guards. Children and graybeards alike fought through the crowd. Marcello’s harsh edicts only increased the solidarity of those who opposed segregation and inequality. A growing percentage of the population spoke out against the war fought in chapels and churchyards, however Marcello’s hands wrapped around many powerful men’s necks. Some genuinely lent him their support. Others did whatever it took to remain breathing. Rafe ashamedly found himself grouped in with the latter.
As he neared the cathedral, people stood shoulder-to-shoulder, shouting and shaking fists. Some threw rubbish—food scraps and animal dung. Rafe’s heartbeat sped as he caught sight of the spectacle. In all, a dozen men stood in their underpants, bound to stakes by rope tied around their chests. With little concern for politeness, Rafe shoved his way through the gawkers until he was close enough to hear Marcello speaking from his stone podium.
The gaunt cleric’s voice carried through the courtyard and beyond. “But these two heavenly bodies were appointed to protect all men. The greater to watch over men’s souls, while the lesser bore rule over the physical body.”
Perfect. Rafe arrived in time to hear the self-proclaimed soul protector compare himself again to the glorious sun in the sky while reducing Rafe and his peers to the second thought of a moon.
“As the moon receives her light from the sun, so too does the governing body of this republic derive its dignity from Edrian authority. Having jurisdiction over all men’s souls then, it is my duty to ensure the pure word of Rada be preserved.” His crimson cassock fluttered in the breeze to menacing effect. “These men have been found guilty of spreading blasphemy and are condemned to die the deaths of heretics.”
Rafe’s pulse throbbed in his ears. He stood on tiptoes, trying to identify the ill-fated savio. He couldn’t see their faces, so he pushed closer.
High-ranking clerics dressed in scarlet robes milled silently as lesser priests carried bundles of wood. Next to Rafe, a woman wept, her sobbing drowned out by shouts of “Burn them!” mixed with desperate pleas for mercy.
The gathered crowd became a living organism. Bodies pushed against each other as the throng surged forward. Pressure carried Rafe like a leaf in a river. He fought to keep his balance. Horrified citizens outnumbered guards a hundred-to-one and while they were normally timid as deer in the forest, Rafe knew the scale could tip any moment. With a lunatic in control of the proceedings, only one thing was certain—people were going to die.
As the smug religious leader of Kanassa grew more demonstrative, individually cursing each dishonored savio, his face contorted into a hideous sneer accentuated by a too-big, crooked nose. “May the souls of these men find their way to the afterlife and Rada’s light comfort them in death.” He motioned for the low-ranking priests to light the wood.
A woman with wild eyes and a flushed face caught Rafe’s attention with her pained shriek. Her white dress unmistakable, the Lucinda tried to tear away from the savio surrounding her. They held her fast as she struggled, screaming, dirtying her skirts past the knee.
Small fires took hold, lit from the sacred flame above the courtyard fountain. Cries erupted. The cowed commoners had seen enough.
Bile rose in Rafe’s stomach.
An old man next to him cringed and covered his eyes with a dirty palm while cheers rose up from nearer the podium.
At a hanging, it wasn’t uncommon for the people to break through to the gallows and pull on the feet of the condemned, speeding their passing. At a burning, disgusted spectators could do nothing. With halberds pointing toward them, all were helpless to ease the suffering. A wall of lucindae in saffron dresses sang through their tears and supported each other with intertwined arms. The wind stirred up clouds of smoke. Choking, it loomed.
Anguished wails rent the air as the first flames lapped at the divine priests’ feet and knees. Rafe closed his eyes. Twelve small fires meant twelve slow deaths. If they had all been tied together, the inner ones would have suffocated before pain touched them. If the wind didn’t calm, it could take more than an hour for those in agony to die of blood loss and shock. A sickening scene, one that would drive home Marcello’s message—oppose him and die.
A black arrow penetrated the chest of one savio, then another. A well-aimed crossbow bolt struck a yowling savio closest to the dais, a young man with a boyish face. He went quiet.
“Up there!” Marcello pointed to a nearby rooftop where three dark-clad figures nocked more arrows. Loosing, they struck one of the prestigious, teal-caped Edrian Guards and an old Radan priest fanning flames under the oldest savio brought to torture. Orange misery seared up his leg, singing the hems of his underpants.
A jet of vomit surged up Rafe’s throat, filling his mouth. He hunched forward, spitting the contents of his empty stomach partly on the cobblestones and partly on a woman’s pale skirt.
As clerics scrambled for cover, some members of the crowd hurled stones. One particularly good throw narrowly missed Marcello, sending him into a crouch behind his podium.
A tide of faded linen and homespun wool pounded against the Edrian Guards tasked with protecting the cathedral compound and its righteous master. Arrows flew again, killing two more dying savio, and six guards broke to pursue the archers. The rest turned on the raging throng. Men-at-arms surrounded their nobles, protecting them in case of a full on riot.
Peasants scurried like rats as teal-caped mercenaries shoved and skewered those nearest them. An old woman fell to the dirt beside Rafe and he grabbed her arm to haul her up as the crowd went mad.
High-ranking clergymen flocked around His Eminence like chicks in the rain, looking to him for protection. Rafe glanced one last time at the murderous gleam in Marcello’s eyes and dragged the old woman along with him as he fought his way through the crowd. The archers were gone. Long gone, and no one would catch them.
Rafe broke free from the crowd scattering in all directions and guided the woman to a low stony wall. “Will you be able to make your way home?” he asked.
“Yes, signor,” she said, her breath shallow and her voice wavering. Her wrinkled features, pulled taut by her drawn expression, reminded Rafe of the faces of refugees from the north, eyes that had witnessed things they could never un-see.
“Hurry on,” he said. “This place is too dangerous to linger. Run home and lock your door!”
She turned and scuttled off, wiping her face with her apron as she went. Rafe headed east, his fingers wrapped around the key to one of the city’s most important buildings. On weak knees, he stumbled into his office and leaned his weight on the desk. He had left the window open and the smell of burning wood permeated everything—his papers, drapes, and even him.
Gagging, Rafe unbuttoned his doublet, throwing it over a chair, and untied the laces of his ruffed collar, letting it fall open over his shoulders. Mind spinning and his guts bubbling with uncomfortable cramping, his elbow nudged a crystal brandy decanter and he paused.
A useless tool, alcohol. Physicians didn’t bring alcohol to an amputation, they brought opium. To think a glass of brandy might somehow heal the grief threatening to consume him seemed improbable. He needed air.
Outside the window, the setting sun refracted rays through a smoky sky, lending a profound beauty to the end of a tragic day. Oranges and reds blended, the sky itself bleeding while bells echoed eternal. Rafe slammed the window shut, the glass rattling.
The office was still. Empty and hollow. Velvet covered every carved chair and order appeared all around him. Neat shelves with alphabetized books, lace doilies under every lamp and bust. It was too tidy. He had to get out.
Moonday, Hare Moon 3
Yvette rolled a pair of crimson silk garters and set them in her vanity drawer.
“Are you going to dress while I watch?” Thorne’s gloomy tone suggested the thought appalled him.
“No.” She tried to ignore his grimace by gathering a pile of clothing off her bed and tossing it behind the privacy screen. “I didn’t expect you back so soon.”
“I thought you were interested in Laich’s progress.” The chair’s feet slid across the floor.
Wearing durable dark trousers and a matching doublet, Yvette emerged. “It’s done?”
“Laich is still working on your truth serum, but I brought something else you might be interested in.” Thorne stood and reached into his doublet. He pulled out a pistol and let its brass catch the light. Proudly he held the weapon up for Yvette.
It was her turn to look disappointed. “You expect one pistol to bring down a corrupt church?” She might have foolishly placed too much trust in the foreigners.
He smiled, undefeated by her assessment. “I understand why we keep Marcello alive, but if we can’t get him to reveal his crimes, I’d like assurance we can make him dead.” A confident grin swept his face. “Laich put fire into the pellets. We shot a few last night.” He slid the pistol back into his doublet and fixed the askew ruffle about his neck. “Let me show you.” He offered his hand, ever pretending to be a gentleman. Yvette snubbed the gesture though in truth, she found it charming. Laich’s engineered pellets were worth seeing.
Thorne opened the balcony door and ushered Yvette through. An iron grate, rusted with age, clung to the exterior of the brothel’s upper wall. Yvette started up and paused before she’d reached the eave. Bells clanged in the distance. Thorne drew in line with her and she caught his sleeve. “Wait.” Yvette turned her gaze east. “Nothing good ever happens when those bells ring.” She scurried down the grate and returned to her chamber.
The hallway door opened and Claudia, young madam of the institution and dressed in the scarlet silk of her trade, entered. “They rounded up a dozen savio from a divine temple near Edri,” she said. “It’s a heresy sanction.”
The seat of Radan power rarely interfered in Kanassa, but it appeared Kanassa had no similar discretion—or at least Marcello didn’t. “He’s carrying it out in public?” Yvette asked, after noting signs of distress on Claudia’s porcelain face.
“The streets are already busy,” Claudia said. “He’s going to set an example with them.”
Yvette crawled over her bed and reached down the side, between mattress and wall. “Then we need to set an example of our own. Are you coming like that? Get dressed.”
“I imagine with everyone at the cathedral, the jail is less protected.” Claudia unlaced her bodice and Thorne averted his eyes as she stripped off articles of silk and donned functional garb. “I may even be able to walk right in and take Vincenzo.”
“No,” Yvette said, pulling her bow from under her bed. “We go to the cathedral first—to ruin His Eminence’s unjust trial. After, you can split off and examine the prison. But don’t move until you’ve reported back here. No one goes in there until I command it.”
Some inner thought pulled Claudia’s demure features into a sly grin. At the age of twenty-seven, she proved wise beyond her years, and Yvette felt a touch responsible for that—but only a touch. “Which set of priests are you bringing your bow for?” Claudia asked.
“I’ll see when we get there,” Yvette said. “Thorne, stow the iron somewhere.” Yvette extricated her quiver from a rolled tapestry.
“I’m not letting it out of my sight.”
Defiance? Wondering at the conflict on his face, Yvette opened her vanity drawer, revealing a false bottom. “We haven’t time for debate. This is as secure a place as any.”
After a moment to consider, Thorne grabbed a pair of linen underpants and wrapped the pistol, tucking it under a disguising layer of lacy underthings.
Claudia, wearing a worn old shirt from Yvette’s drawer, tugged her bow and quiver from behind the wardrobe and threw a cloak over her shoulders. “Ready?” Yvette pulled up her hood and tossed a case of quarrels to Thorne.
He caught it. “What are these for?”
Yvette slid a crossbow from under the bed. “You know how to use this?”
Thorne frowned and took it from her grasp. “I’m a fair shot.”
“Good,” Yvette said, patting his arm. “You’ll have to fill Vincenzo’s place until we get him back.” Yvette followed Claudia, her dark-haired protégé, to the balcony door. “If we get separated, don’t either of you come back here until you’re sure you aren’t being followed.”
*
Rafe Venieri sat at his desk, surrounded by papers and bottles of ink. He glanced at the timepiece on the shelf. A cast bronze baby with a round belly and naked bottom lay draped atop the rounded clock face, its pudgy hand hanging down over the side, holding a rose. Bells rang at the cathedral. He loosened his cravat and pushed up his black velvet doublet sleeve.
Through his open office door, Rafe saw two old men leave their seats to peer through hand-blown glass, for what little good it did them. Rafe dipped his pen and tapped it, indifferent to the summons. He spent no more time within the walls of the haunted tomb than the law demanded, Sundays from nine to noon and Radan holidays. “I’ll take my religion in small doses,” he grumbled, drawing his quill over the paper.
A scrivener poked his head in the door. “Cancelliere Venieri?”
Rafe didn’t bother to look up. “Yes?” Twice in a month, the bells beckoned people to the square before the cathedral courtyard lined with guards. Both times, His Eminence, Lazaro Marcello, passed religious edicts. The first forbade anyone not baptized in the cathedral, becoming a senator. After angering a number of noble families, some of whom came from the divine-worshipping territories to the north, the decree was overturned. A battle His Excellency, Kanassa’s doge, won against the cleric overstepping his authority. The other edict, a fine for wearing red on Sundays, was still in effect. Rafe wasn’t bothered; he preferred somber tones.
“Signor, the bells.”
“Go if you wish.” Rafe dipped his pen. “I have things to do.” He didn’t say what he wanted tosay—that hearing the words of Rada disseminated through unholy lips was low on his list of priorities. When the scrivener left, Rafe blew his fresh ink, careful not to smudge it after he signed his name. He affixed a seal and pressed the hot wax with his carved amber chancery stamp. “Frederico,” he called his apprentice. “I need you to go to the courier.”
No one came.
Rafe headed into the main office. It was empty. On the desks, brushes lay, not even rinsed. Papers scattered the floor, blown from a desk when scribes left in haste. Rafe crouched to retrieve them. No sense leaving documents to be trod on and have to rewrite them.
Beyond the open door, a town crier passed among the throng in the street. “Injustice! Irreverence! Impiety!” His scraggly beard waggled when he shouted accusations, holding aloft a crinkled page. A missive, one of hundreds scattered throughout town, denouncing deification of the seven holy divines representing the phases of life—the child, the maiden and the hunter, the mother and the farmer, and the crone and the elder.
Preaching equality for all people, the Order of Divines gained support in Kanassa from the ever-growing middle class, especially patrician women. Not only did the Order of Divines accept women into their ranks, they were led by a single high priestess—the Lucinda, purported embodiment of peace and spiritual purity. She even appeared at the doge’s side when a Fjeran prince visited Kanassa from across the sea, for the winter Festival of Lights.
Despite the Radan Church’s insistence that deifying any human qualified as heresy, Kanassa’s citizens rejected the dissolution of their preferred faith.
People cheered, joining the crier in his chant. Rafe shielded his eyes with his hand as he stepped into the sunlit street. The chancery lay a quarter mile east of the cathedral, yet carriages blocked the road, mired by the sheer number of pedestrians. He had never seen so many people turn up for a religious speech. It looked more like an execution.
Rafe’s breath caught in his throat. He tossed his documents onto a nearby desk and closed the door of the chancery, locking it. Three and four-story buildings cast the late afternoon street into shadows. A young man stood above the foot traffic, arms wound around a cast iron lamppost while he shouted. “Idianna died for her husband, Rada, and he now charges us to show mercy to our fellow man, to all people. Where is His Holiness’ mercy now?”
Rafe’s answer came out a grumble. “The same place as every other virtue when it becomes unprofitable.” He hurried down the road, ever south.
Cast aside were class barriers as people flooded the streets. Women in kerchiefs and patched linen bodices stood next to nobles flanked by liveried guards. Children and graybeards alike fought through the crowd. Marcello’s harsh edicts only increased the solidarity of those who opposed segregation and inequality. A growing percentage of the population spoke out against the war fought in chapels and churchyards, however Marcello’s hands wrapped around many powerful men’s necks. Some genuinely lent him their support. Others did whatever it took to remain breathing. Rafe ashamedly found himself grouped in with the latter.
As he neared the cathedral, people stood shoulder-to-shoulder, shouting and shaking fists. Some threw rubbish—food scraps and animal dung. Rafe’s heartbeat sped as he caught sight of the spectacle. In all, a dozen men stood in their underpants, bound to stakes by rope tied around their chests. With little concern for politeness, Rafe shoved his way through the gawkers until he was close enough to hear Marcello speaking from his stone podium.
The gaunt cleric’s voice carried through the courtyard and beyond. “But these two heavenly bodies were appointed to protect all men. The greater to watch over men’s souls, while the lesser bore rule over the physical body.”
Perfect. Rafe arrived in time to hear the self-proclaimed soul protector compare himself again to the glorious sun in the sky while reducing Rafe and his peers to the second thought of a moon.
“As the moon receives her light from the sun, so too does the governing body of this republic derive its dignity from Edrian authority. Having jurisdiction over all men’s souls then, it is my duty to ensure the pure word of Rada be preserved.” His crimson cassock fluttered in the breeze to menacing effect. “These men have been found guilty of spreading blasphemy and are condemned to die the deaths of heretics.”
Rafe’s pulse throbbed in his ears. He stood on tiptoes, trying to identify the ill-fated savio. He couldn’t see their faces, so he pushed closer.
High-ranking clerics dressed in scarlet robes milled silently as lesser priests carried bundles of wood. Next to Rafe, a woman wept, her sobbing drowned out by shouts of “Burn them!” mixed with desperate pleas for mercy.
The gathered crowd became a living organism. Bodies pushed against each other as the throng surged forward. Pressure carried Rafe like a leaf in a river. He fought to keep his balance. Horrified citizens outnumbered guards a hundred-to-one and while they were normally timid as deer in the forest, Rafe knew the scale could tip any moment. With a lunatic in control of the proceedings, only one thing was certain—people were going to die.
As the smug religious leader of Kanassa grew more demonstrative, individually cursing each dishonored savio, his face contorted into a hideous sneer accentuated by a too-big, crooked nose. “May the souls of these men find their way to the afterlife and Rada’s light comfort them in death.” He motioned for the low-ranking priests to light the wood.
A woman with wild eyes and a flushed face caught Rafe’s attention with her pained shriek. Her white dress unmistakable, the Lucinda tried to tear away from the savio surrounding her. They held her fast as she struggled, screaming, dirtying her skirts past the knee.
Small fires took hold, lit from the sacred flame above the courtyard fountain. Cries erupted. The cowed commoners had seen enough.
Bile rose in Rafe’s stomach.
An old man next to him cringed and covered his eyes with a dirty palm while cheers rose up from nearer the podium.
At a hanging, it wasn’t uncommon for the people to break through to the gallows and pull on the feet of the condemned, speeding their passing. At a burning, disgusted spectators could do nothing. With halberds pointing toward them, all were helpless to ease the suffering. A wall of lucindae in saffron dresses sang through their tears and supported each other with intertwined arms. The wind stirred up clouds of smoke. Choking, it loomed.
Anguished wails rent the air as the first flames lapped at the divine priests’ feet and knees. Rafe closed his eyes. Twelve small fires meant twelve slow deaths. If they had all been tied together, the inner ones would have suffocated before pain touched them. If the wind didn’t calm, it could take more than an hour for those in agony to die of blood loss and shock. A sickening scene, one that would drive home Marcello’s message—oppose him and die.
A black arrow penetrated the chest of one savio, then another. A well-aimed crossbow bolt struck a yowling savio closest to the dais, a young man with a boyish face. He went quiet.
“Up there!” Marcello pointed to a nearby rooftop where three dark-clad figures nocked more arrows. Loosing, they struck one of the prestigious, teal-caped Edrian Guards and an old Radan priest fanning flames under the oldest savio brought to torture. Orange misery seared up his leg, singing the hems of his underpants.
A jet of vomit surged up Rafe’s throat, filling his mouth. He hunched forward, spitting the contents of his empty stomach partly on the cobblestones and partly on a woman’s pale skirt.
As clerics scrambled for cover, some members of the crowd hurled stones. One particularly good throw narrowly missed Marcello, sending him into a crouch behind his podium.
A tide of faded linen and homespun wool pounded against the Edrian Guards tasked with protecting the cathedral compound and its righteous master. Arrows flew again, killing two more dying savio, and six guards broke to pursue the archers. The rest turned on the raging throng. Men-at-arms surrounded their nobles, protecting them in case of a full on riot.
Peasants scurried like rats as teal-caped mercenaries shoved and skewered those nearest them. An old woman fell to the dirt beside Rafe and he grabbed her arm to haul her up as the crowd went mad.
High-ranking clergymen flocked around His Eminence like chicks in the rain, looking to him for protection. Rafe glanced one last time at the murderous gleam in Marcello’s eyes and dragged the old woman along with him as he fought his way through the crowd. The archers were gone. Long gone, and no one would catch them.
Rafe broke free from the crowd scattering in all directions and guided the woman to a low stony wall. “Will you be able to make your way home?” he asked.
“Yes, signor,” she said, her breath shallow and her voice wavering. Her wrinkled features, pulled taut by her drawn expression, reminded Rafe of the faces of refugees from the north, eyes that had witnessed things they could never un-see.
“Hurry on,” he said. “This place is too dangerous to linger. Run home and lock your door!”
She turned and scuttled off, wiping her face with her apron as she went. Rafe headed east, his fingers wrapped around the key to one of the city’s most important buildings. On weak knees, he stumbled into his office and leaned his weight on the desk. He had left the window open and the smell of burning wood permeated everything—his papers, drapes, and even him.
Gagging, Rafe unbuttoned his doublet, throwing it over a chair, and untied the laces of his ruffed collar, letting it fall open over his shoulders. Mind spinning and his guts bubbling with uncomfortable cramping, his elbow nudged a crystal brandy decanter and he paused.
A useless tool, alcohol. Physicians didn’t bring alcohol to an amputation, they brought opium. To think a glass of brandy might somehow heal the grief threatening to consume him seemed improbable. He needed air.
Outside the window, the setting sun refracted rays through a smoky sky, lending a profound beauty to the end of a tragic day. Oranges and reds blended, the sky itself bleeding while bells echoed eternal. Rafe slammed the window shut, the glass rattling.
The office was still. Empty and hollow. Velvet covered every carved chair and order appeared all around him. Neat shelves with alphabetized books, lace doilies under every lamp and bust. It was too tidy. He had to get out.
