For more centuries that she could count, she had worn the nine hundred keys of Hell on an iron ring on her belt. They dragged behind her, a long and heavy chain. Her husband had given her the keeping of those keys, given her the weight of them to bear because it made him laugh to see it. That was his first and final error.
The first thing she did, when she finally managed to imprison him in Hell’s deepest oubliette, was to change the locks.
She would have liked to destroy the keys. What is an oubliette with a key? Not an oubliette at all. Keys are for remembering.
But her husband had taught her that the beast called Hell could not be destroyed; not any part of it could be destroyed. Its keys and its locks were as much a part of its great body as its teeth and its guts.
So she went to the most skilled of her husband’s torturers, who used the fires of Hell to mar his victims in the most beautiful ways.
Gobhan Og, a wrinkled turnip of a man who had been a smith once, confirmed that the keys were indestructible, nodding sadly.
“They can change, as all flesh changes. The flesh of Hell may be iron or brimstone or pus or chitin, but no matter what it looks like, it is still flesh, and it may be altered in Hell’s furnaces. Altering is not destroying.”
“Then you will alter them, and if you please me, you will be my chief artificer. My weapon-master. I will have no more torturers.”
The Hellbeast required feeding: it must drain the life from revenants, from people held in the moment between death and life for long years. But the Chatelaine would take those people from the wounded who were already dying. She would be a kinder ruler of Hell than her husband had been.
She must keep a key for her husband’s oubliette but she was strong enough to remember. She would remember that she had power over her husband now, that this was a power she had made herself.
“Take all of my keys,” she said to Gobhan Og, throwing one end of the chain of keys onto his great anvil. “Make them all into a single weapon that I may wear. What sort of a weapon would work like a key?”
Gobhan Og thought. He had been out in the world, getting food for the Beast. He had seen something of the world’s weapons.
“A flanged mace, perhaps, if we remade all the locks to fit its flanges.”
“Excellent.”
“In place of your lovely hand, my mistress?” he looked at her eagerly.
She looked at her hand, the dark brown flesh still so young-looking, the nails still so pink.
“I think not,” she said. “Let me wear it like a gauntlet.”
She had borne the keys already for more than a lifetime. If she must bear them forever; let her wield them as well.
The mace fit over her hand perfectly and worked its edge into the flesh of her forearm. It was heavier than it looked, forged of all the many keys of her husband’s many rooms.
She remembered enough about the surface to know that it was safest to arrive with entitlements, with power. Not as some wandering nameless girl, some exile with no land and no memory. No. She would come back to the surface, but with Hell at her back.
She had set the torturers to new work, with an edict that they were to make, not mar. The fires of Hell could fuse anything without killing it, because Hell was a creature in which Life and Death did not rule. Those furnaces could join metal and flesh, and glass and fur, and any other things that the artificers’ imagination could compass. She would make an army of chimeras, offering the changes to anyone willing. And there were many willing.
They had started with a French brigand. How miserable he had been when he wandered into what he thought—he swore he thought—was a mere cave. How he had loathed himself for the sins of his past. He had asked her if he could ever be made pure. And so she led him to the furnace, where her beloved unicorn waited. In they went together, into the fire, unicorn and man. That was her first great sacrifice, her first great gift.
She had not been certain it would work. But it did, and he was beautiful. A body like a man’s, but larger, bronzed and muscled, and with the great horn in the middle of his forehead.
She asked Chaerephon to name him and he called him Monoceros.
Monoceros taught the Chatelaine his French language. He became her marshal as his reward. The first of her chimeras.
She said the word chimeras lovingly, the way one gives a kitten the name of an ogre, to show how fragile it is.
The chimeras chose their own gifts, just as the victims had once chosen their own punishments; will was the bellows that fed the fires of Hell.
But there were risks. Soon after they came to the French Court, they met a young noblewoman marred by smallpox, unmarriageable, a reluctant nun. She admired Monoceros and his skin like bronze, asked to be given a skin smooth as Italian glass. The Chatelaine agreed, thinking of the armour she could make.
Gobhan Og vitrified the noblewoman clear through; he let his furnace get too hot.
The Chatelaine demoted him in a fury. No longer Head Artificer, he would labour with a shovel, cleaning the unmentionable mess made by the forges. The saltpeter from the flying creatures that were Hell’s parasites. The brimstone that collected in its cloaca.
And Gobhan Og had begun to plot against her.
The Chatelaine stopped pacing. She opened her eyes and swung her mace, remembering how pleasantly it had bit into Gobhan Og’s skull, how it had spilled his treasonous brain all over the floor of his little chamber, how the beast had absorbed it into its shining red flesh.
The Mantis-man who guarded her door opened it and coughed in the strange way of his kind, and then Monoceros stood there. Her beautiful horned man, the first of her servants. The only one she could trust.
“What news?” she asked him.
“The hounds think perhaps the mercenary Claude Jouvenal might have gone to Bruges. I gave them the scent off the aketon the mercenary once wore, and they followed a trail to the moat of Bruges. But of course they could go no further, as the town’s walls still stand, for now.”
Her beautiful hounds, made out of a dozen men and women with broken backs or broken necks, whose bodies were frozen and who had been left to rot to death in their bedsores. She put their heads on the hounds, and set them off as a pack. The double-headed hounds had the loyalty of dogs, and the anger of nearly-dead humans.
Monoceros stood, waiting.
She paced. She must have the forged mace back—not just a mace but a key, a key to every lock within the beast and to its very bridle. With the forgery, the mercenary girl could return, could open any door she liked, could open the doors to Hell’s oubliettes, could free any prisoner there.
And the French king was growing impatient. Demanding the surrender of Bruges, but the Chatelaine had lost more than half her forces at Cassel. If she spent any more in attacking a walled city, she would be weakened indeed.
“Let us see if the gonner-chimeras can frighten Bruges into surrender,” she said. “If all goes well, they will have those gates open by sundown.”
CHAPTER FIVE
A woman was picking through a midden between two houses, a rolling pin in one hand. She looked up when Margriet passed. They peered at each other like suspicious crones, although Margriet was still young enough to bear children and this woman looked not much older than she was.
The fingers around the rolling pin were black. She kept clutching and re-clutching it, as if keeping hold of her weapon by sheer force of will. Already taken by the first stages of the Plague, but her eyes were sharp. It had not been she who let the revenants in to her house.
Soon, her skin would fall away in clumps, leaving bloody welts on her back and chest. The Plague killed from the outside in: first the numb, dead skin, then the attacks of heart and lungs and brain. Her breathing was already laboured, although that might be ordinary fear or want.