The Fecund's Melancholy Daughter - Brent Hayward [102]
By then, hopefully, she would be light years away.
Officers of the palatinate carried the chamberlain up the East Stairs on his litter. He was not able to mount these stairs for the energy that had recently filled him had now fled. Erricus felt old and ill. On the second floor of Jesthe, his men were everywhere he looked, as if the walls had secreted them. The palace had suffered considerable damage. Gods had come and gone. Whatever the deities sought was not found in the city or her citizens.
Towers had fallen. Buildings burned. He pressed his fingers together to stop them from shaking.
The chatelaine was not in her room. Rubble had covered the floor of the Great Hall, though the empty bedchambers remained intact.
Of course she passed palatinate, who moved cautiously toward her, gravely, and she thought to herself that they could keep the rotten palace for all she cared. Down and outside through the small courtyard, starting to sob, with snot on her lips, she ran toward the gates. Smoke was thick in the air and she heard the cries of her people.
Across the deserted Gardens, into the centrum, she stopped to peer at the ruins.
The chatelaine wandered in a daze all of that night, knowing it would be her last. Images of destruction, and of the maelstrom—bodies of the huge gods, lifting above the blazing skyline, shattering the dungeon—would never leave her.
She hoped her father was at peace.
Scrambling up the embankment to the River Crane, and onto the promenade, the chatelaine scraped her shin. Pain, blooming, was exquisite. She stood there for a second, focusing on the wound, on her dark fluids spilling out, before peering over the sluggish waters. She wondered how long would it take to drown, and if her body would leave Nowy Solum, floating on the filthy river until it fell off the edge of the world.
Clumsy, fumbling, she began to negotiate the slippery rocks, hands fluttering ahead of her.
A dark and silent funeral barge headed toward the gates. When she was knee deep, she was surprised by the sound of wings, approaching. Turning, she nearly fell.
The cherub, coming from the sky, cried out, “Mother, mother! At last!”
With a gasp, the chatelaine caught her pet, snugly, bringing it close, holding it as tight as she had ever held anything before. She closed her eyes, clinging to the trembling cherub as it folded its wings, afraid her baby might vanish once more.
“I’ve been looking for so long.” The cherub’s breath, hot in her ear. “The things I have seen, mother. The things I have seen.”
The chatelaine stroked the cherub’s head, her sobs diminishing.
Over the shattered silhouette of Nowy Solum, clouds were turning to amber, but these clouds seemed very thin today—the thinnest, in fact, the chatelaine had ever seen. She wondered if she would ever recover from the shock and heartbreak, should she make the foolish choice to continue living.
The cherub was already asleep against her shoulder.
Turning, to make her way back to shore, the chatelaine sighed, and the horizon past Jesthe ruptured with an astonishing patch of blue.
about the author
Brent Hayward’s fiction has appeared in several publications and anthologies, including Horizons SF, On Spec, ChiZine, the Tesseracts series, and Chilling Tales. In 2006, his story “Phallex Comes Out” was nominated for the StorySouth Million Writers Award as best online story of that year; it received an honourable mention. Filaria, his first novel, was published by ChiZine Publications in 2008 and has since garnered solid acclaim.
Born in London, England, raised in Montreal, he currently he lives in Toronto with his family. He can be reached through his LiveJournal at: http://brenth.livejournal.com
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