Armed in Her Fashion

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

The Chatelaine rode home on her pale palfrey, its hair braided with red and yellow ribbons. This horse had been with her in Hell two years now, stabled in one of the narrow chambers with uneven floors that were useless for anything else, and it was starting to show signs of it: it was ever more bony, its eyes wild, its nostrils flared. She had not given it a name, not even in secret, for she knew well enough that this beast might soon be destined for the fires of Hell, to make a chimera.

The Mantis-man and Roach-man had gone before them. Her hounds ran alongside, yapping with delight in the cool, bright day. Their human faces grimaced at Chaerephon where he sat. He made them nervous, and this pleased him.

“You are out of humour,” he said mildly.

“If you hadn’t noticed, we have lost all hope of reward from the king, the ally we have served two years now. We are betrayed.”

“Not so. He asked you to do a task for him. Kings only ask their most trusted favourites to do their dirtiest business. Ergo, he is showing you favour.”

“He is showing me who is king.”

“Yes. And did you ever challenge that? At the very beginning, when you came out of the earth, you came looking for a man to bestow land upon you, instead of seizing land for your own.”

“Perhaps that was an error. It was your advice, as I recall.”

“And still good advice. What could you have done, with your revenants? Slowly throttle Bruges, the greatest and richest city of Europe, into grey death? Leave it waste? If you want land, good land peopled by living people to farm and mine and trade, you need to earn it, not conquer it.”

“Unless I can make better weapons, and win faster.”

“Yes,” said Chaerephon. “Or you could do as the king asks, and gain his trust.”

The Chatelaine frowned. She would have thought Chaerephon, of all people, would understand. It was one thing to send her armies to war alongside Philippe as an ally, even as a vassal. It was another to put Hell itself at his command, to make revenants of whomever he wished. Who would truly hold the key, then, even if remained upon her hand?

They were nearly home now. Hell was before them, its mouth shut tight, its eyes closed nearly completely, with just a slit of red light where the lashless lids met. The Beast seemed to have piled up fresh earth around itself in a kind of burrow.

The Chatelaine dismounted, strode to the mouth and put her mace to the lock at one side of the Beast’s bridle. She used her left hand to twist the mace, the end of which rotated until the great bridle creaked open and the sulphurous red mouth yawned before them.

The sooner they were gone from here, the better.

She walked her palfrey into the Mouth, the hounds trotting alongside on the thick red tongue as if it were a Roman road.

She twisted the mace again to close the mouth, and then they were enclosed in the beast’s mouth. The air here was warm and close; safe.

“Where should we go, Chaerephon?” she asked.

“You are running away, then?”

“I am finding a new place, where I will be the mistress. No more asking for scraps.”

Chaerephon shrugged. “If you are determined to give up the work of these two years—”

“Not give it up. We have dozens of grotesques now, and more revenants than before. We have learned a great deal about war and we are perfecting the black-powder weapons. We will be stronger the next time.”

Chaerephon sighed. “Then let us find a place where the people are more civilized, and the weather is warmer.”

The Chatelaine left her mace in the bridle and said to the Beast in the language she had forbidden, “Go south. South and east, until you come to water.”

The Beast shuddered but did not move.

“Go now,” she said. “Down into the earth. I hold the keys of Hell. You must obey.”

This time the Beast did not so much as shudder.

“It will not obey,” she whispered, hearing the high note of panic in her own voice. “Chaerephon, what do I do?”

“Perhaps it is injured,” he said. “Let us go out again and see what we can see.”

For a moment the Chatelaine wondered whether the Beast had ceased entirely to obey, whether they were trapped in Hell forever. But it opened its mouth obligingly, letting the daylight in.

She sent the dogs scampering and whimpering inside, and she and Chaerephon stepped out into the cold world. Chaerephon nosed his way around the Hellbeast’s mouth, to the side of its head, where there was a very narrow space between its body and the wall of its burrow.

“In there?” the Chatelaine asked. “We’ll be buried alive if it so much as sneezes.”

“Wait for me, then,” he said, and was hidden behind the earth.

In a moment he came out again.

“I think you will find this worth seeing with your own eyes,” said Chaerephon.

They squeezed in. The fur of the beast was slick as velvet. The Chatelaine ran her hand along it to keep herself upright in the shifting tunnel, until her hand came to a matted protuberance. She looked, and saw the sleek body of a tick, the size of a rat. She winced and kept her hands to herself.

“Here,” said Chaerephon. “Step very carefully.”

He squeezed over into the body of the beast to make room for her to come beside him. There beside the beast were three pale eggs as large as boulders, the shells like ivory.

“What are these?” said the Chatelaine. “Surely not.”

“Your husband,” said Chaerephon carefully, “was always in the habit of calling the Hellbeast ‘she.’ ‘Hell is a female creature,’ he used to say.”

“But what—what is in the eggs?”

“I would very much like to see them hatch. Hmm. That is fascinating.”

“Indeed, that is one word for it.”

“Eggs! Who would have thought it, of a furred creature? Just like the—what was the new name the king gave it? The Hochepot, in your menagerie.”

The fool was in love with the sound of his own voice, and they were stuck here, and meanwhile the King of France would be sending an army against them. Philippe wanted control of the Beast, and if he could not control it through the Chatelaine, he would take it. Soon she would be in a dungeon somewhere, and God knew what would happen if the King of France was foolish enough to find and free her husband.

“The question is,” said Chaerephon, “is Hell is the mother, then who is the father?”

She did not care to know, or even to wonder.

“Can we smash them with our hands?” she whispered, in French, although she was not entirely confident the Beast had not learned French. It only obeyed the language of Hell, and spoke no word itself. “Shall I fetch a rock?”

The beast rumbled and dirt fell onto their heads.

Chaerephon put his fingers to his lips. “I would not harm Hell’s young, not for all of Midas’s gold.”

“Then what?”

“Eggs hatch. We wait.”

“But how long?” she asked. “We don’t know how close they are to hatching. Once they hatch, she may not want to move even then.”

The Chatelaine shut her eyes. How long could she stall with Philippe? She could pretend to be on his side, pretend to be preparing to take the King of England. She could even tell the truth about the Hellbeast and the eggs, although she did not want to give Philippe any information he might try to use to his advantage.

Without saying another word to Chaerephon, she walked toward the burrow’s exit and waited for him to follow. She had been so pleased when he took her side. He had even encouraged her to act against her husband; without him, she might have waited longer.

Had he known about the eggs? Was it all a plot against her?

A thought came to her, a beautiful, horrible thought. Whatever hatched from those eggs would be hers, hers to guide and guard from birth. Hellbeasts of her own, whose loyalty was not in doubt. She would not need a key for them. She would make them into a new army, her third army.

The only thing she could trust was strength. She would need more chimeras, too, and more powerful ones. She needed weapons that could level a city. She would put Philippe off as long as she could, but in the meantime she would get stronger.

“While we wait, I want to make more gonners, better ones, and more black powder,” she said to Chaerephon over her shoulder. “Set the Mantis-men to scraping the bat grime off the walls of the great hall. I’ve never been so happy that the Beast shits brimstone. But we’ll need more charcoal. Check on our burners, and send riders out farther this time to collect more from the smithies and forges.”