Armed in Her Fashion

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

The Chatelaine did not believe Margriet de Vos, or trust her. A city woman, who smelled of dry fish and babies. A woman who measured her life in coins and cloth, and yet wanted now to be made a weapon. The Chatelaine could not understand it, and the sooner Margriet was put onto the anvil, the sooner it would be clear whether she was lying.

So she had a smith put rings around Margriet. The rings were ready, for she had wanted to try this for some time now. To make a powder weapon more powerful—or at the very least more frightening—than the gonner-chimeras who had blown themselves up at the wall of Bruges. If this worked, she would make more tomorrow. And then Philippe would see what she could do.

Monoceros whispered to her, “I want to see what Chaerephon is up to.”

She nodded. Good of him to remember. Loyal Monoceros, little better than a beast. She must remember not to have any more philosophers around her.

The smiths put the ringed woman through the fire, face first.

“Wait,” said the Chatelaine. She took her fingernail and found a place where the flesh of the woman showed through the rings. She scratched the words ULTIMA RATIO MULIERUM in the blood; the skin shuddered and bled but the woman did not cry out, for she had iron in her throat.

Margriet de Vos came out with her arms and legs fused, with her mouth open and her skin bronzed darker than Monoceros’s, as if her whole skin were armour. She came out silent. The Chatelaine crouched and looked into Margriet’s unblinking eyes, at her mouth, now wide open, but silent.

They put a long tube of iron down Margriet’s throat, and she thought nothing could hurt more than that. She would be dead soon and she was glad of it.

And then something did hurt more: the fire was everywhere as her flesh melted into the metal and became metal, as her open mouth became the mouth of a cannon. She felt her eyes sliding backwards, like the eyes of the great sea monster figurehead on the boat that her father had most admired. He had taken her to see it, many times, when she was a child, before the violence of the Matins of Bruges, before he became a smaller man, a reduced man.

When she came out, the pain was a dull throb. She could not hear very well anymore, but she could see, and the worst of it was how cold she felt. How cold the hot air of Hell felt against her metal skin.

She honed her thoughts. The only task that remained to her in this life was to explode, the way the gonner-chimeras had, but bigger. More powerfully. Enough so that the Chatelaine herself might be killed, and if not, at least a part of her army would go. Revenge for Margriet’s lost life. For her daughter, wherever she might be now. For Bruges itself, her beautiful city, the city of canals where Margriet had learned to love the world.

They set her on a cart that did not fit her. They rolled her, rollicking and bumping, up through the throat of the beast. The Chatelaine opened the lock. No sign of Claude or Gertrude. Margriet hoped they had got themselves well clear.

“No sign of Monoceros?” the Chatelaine asked one of her Mantis-men.

The trick would be in fooling them, in drawing them close.

They loaded the powder in and set the match. They put a bolt in her mouth, a long bar of wood that had been a spear, she thought. They did not care much about the bolt itself, how true it would fly; they just wanted to test the powder to see if it worked. They loaded the powder. The Chatelaine retreated to a safe distance.

Margriet had never been a very good liar but she thought she could manage a feint.

She swallowed it down when the powder ignited. All of her bile, all of her hate. She swallowed dampness out of the air and it worked.

They thought it had failed.

“It’s a new mix,” said the chimera loading her, his voice echoing in an empty helmet. “We were hasty, perhaps. We did not mix it wet and let it dry. No time.”

“Add more, then,” said the Chatelaine.

They added more. Margriet swallowed it down. She let the fire rumble through parts of her they did not know she had. She destroyed it.

The third time, they spilled all they had into her. And the Chatelaine, growing impatient, stood a little closer.

Margriet asked God to bless her enterprise.

This time Margriet forced the fire out of herself, out through all the cracks. She knew nothing more.

Beatrix walked through the darkness. She did not even know which direction to walk. The smell of brimstone was on the air but she could not follow it, could not get a sense of its direction.

A boom resounded through the air and a great light lit up the horizon. The very clouds were bright wounds in the sky afterward, with clouds of black smoke swirling in front. This must be her vision come to pass.

Saint Catherine, she prayed. Where are you? Will you help me?

She wanted to run as far as she could from the fire, but Mother and Gertrude and Claude might have been there, and they might need her help.

And indeed, as she walked closer to it, shielding her eyes against the light, she saw the head of the great Hellbeast. But it was bloodied and torn, a gash breaking through one of its eyes. There were bodies all around, chimera bodies.

A giant egg rolled in front of her. It was as high as her shoulder, and cracked clean across. A very thin hand almost like a human hand, and a long arm, reached out of it.

Then she saw a half-dozen of the eggs lying around, all cracked, with thin arms and legs coming out of them.

The beast itself groaned, and retreated until there was nothing left but the mounded earth where it had been.

“Beatrix!” she heard behind her.

She looked and her eyes had to adjust to the darkness. She saw Gertrude holding her distaff, and she ran to her.

Gertrude handed her the distaff and then kissed her cheek.

“We must leave,” Claude hissed. Some of the fur had fallen off her face in patches but she looked fearsome all the same.

“Mother,” said Beatrix.

“She’s gone,” Claude said. “Dead. She’s the one who did this.”

It was not possible. It was a mistake.

“But how?” Beatrix asked

“No time. It was quick, quicker than the Plague would have been. Come on.”

Beatrix picked up her distaff and felt it wet. She sniffed her hand; blood.

“What happened in there?” she asked Gertrude as they ran.

“I speared a hound,” Gertrude yelled, and laughed.

After a few steps they nearly tripped over the sack.

“You got it,” Beatrix breathed.

“Yes, we got your stupid coins. All that for this,” Claude said, heaving it.

They walked a little more and then they heard a voice in the darkness say, “Claude.”