Seth felt the hot droplets of the preservative blood that pumped through it on the back of his neck. He smeared them away and examined his hand. This smear of red had joined the green Legion sash as the only color on him.
Ahead of them, Rafi held his own gory blade up, to similarly raucous reception. Behind them, Larson a’Lauvey drew his, with an overenthusiastic yank that scythe-bladed the blood outward into the crowd. The crow-clad bachelorette it painted red didn’t seem to mind; she whooped wildly and jumped up and down, her bustier showing through the low cut of her coatee.
Seth remembered what the twins had told him of lit life in the city, how eager the competition was to snuff your wick. Sleeping with an ensouled Verdugo would surely be the grandest prize of them all.
They’d crossed the bridge now, past towering precipices of polished stone decorated with statues of heroes and halberdiers whose carved musculature bulged in confederate determination to hold up the woven threads of galvanized steel suspension that anchored the paved road above its murky moat.
Around their heads and higher up, in windows forty vertiginous floors above the water, flylamps burned, burnishing the gleaming banisters into a pallid caramel wash. The unlit swarmed and cheered and hurled great armfuls of black-and-white confetti. A festival in monochrome.
Flechette festivity came cutting down through the green air in starling drifts. Some the petals of a greenhouse’s worth of flowers; some was paper. Confetti, yes, but between the milled-for-purpose stuff was ledger paper and broadsheet and old bills, whatever the offices had going spare, dumped by the armful into the updraft off the river. It caught the light. It went into Seth’s collar and his hair and the horses’ manes, and Draco tossed his head and did not break stride, because Draco had done this eleven times before.
A crisp, floral taste suddenly dried the center of Seth’s mouth. He coughed to dislodge it from his soft palate and a crumpled flower petal landed in his palm. Ahead of them, Rafi wagged a finger. He cried something over the cacophony that reached Seth in snatches: “I told you, Mr. il Gutierre! Mouth shut!”
The landmarks were coming into view now. The glow of the psychelith cut itself from the sky in jagged facets lit from within by millions—millions, Saints help us—of disembodied souls. With a pair of infuser’s goggles, perhaps you could even see them—the invisible strings that linked the people to the souls that swam within life-preserving crystal goliath like a woven skein laid across the city.
And the Bastion. Their destination. Built in brutalist simplicity centuries ago at the broken rim of a crag over the North Delta, the seed of a black-bricked metropolis that had bloomed upward to meet it and cover it in a megaregurgitation of every fine artist’s magnum opus from across a terrified and grateful continent, like an ancient hull crusted with barnacles or an underwater volcano whose layers of magma had formed a breaching island, until the ugly blocks of the original fort had been buried in an intricate reef of flying buttresses and ribbed vaults and towering traceries and boss stones filigreed with this Saint or that one and reliquary spires and criss-crossing transepts like an asterisk or a star of granite, now steepled with pointed pinnacles whose tympana were so crowded with antique warriors and leering skulls and gargoyles and shrieking grotesques that the eye whirlpooled to behold it, that the shield borne by a bold legionnaire upon a carved relief battlefield had within its compass, as if painted on the wood, another battlefield, with more scenes of heroic bloodshed upon it with details matching the first into unthinkable minutiae, into a fractal infinity whose depth was primordial, whose stone developed a life beyond and before and supplanting the life that had built it and lived in its shadow, eternal and undying and glaring down upon its witnesses as if to say: All you who perish and flow through the Turning Wheel, all flesh fails, all breath fades. But not the Legion. Vivat a Nekropoli. Vivat a Legia Aeterna.
At the very crest of the Necropolis’s peregrine mausoleums, that world-cracking flash of green came again. This close it was not a lightning bolt but a universal blink, inverted from the mind’s murky black to the soul’s brilliant emerald. Its casting strobed the street in brilliant neon, sent every shadow leaping back, and a simian backwater in Seth’s brain froze over in preparation for the thunder, but none came, just a low tuneful thrum in bipart, like the massive slow lub-dub of a metropolis-sized heart fit to keep the world beating.
Which it is, Seth suddenly understood, with fearful veneration. Which it does. The energy of thousands upon thousands of deaths from across the continent, riding the rails to the Necropolis, feeding the Legion who blistered the sky all the way back with the returning obituary pulse. A permanent death-engine within a vault of towering stone-and-steel ribs, pumping countless oblivions across a continent frozen at the threshold of what ought to have been its own oblivion in turn brought by millions of gnashing maws and tearing claws.
It was one thing to know it. To see it turned him impossibly small. A mote of dust blown from the surface of the world by the cosmic wind, swirled in the eddies of the passage of some incomprehensible titanic something. If he hadn’t had one already, he’d have needed to find a seat.
And this is your reason now. Fueling the deathspell. This is what you will spend the rest of your life in service to.
Lisa grinned and nudged him with her knee, as if mistaking his existential dread for excited awe. And perhaps that’s what it was. Not since his own unlighting had he been called upon to contain such an emotion, one too large and unnameable to fit inside him.
No, he decided, daring to look again at the horrible beauty of the bewitched sky. That isn’t what your life is for. That’s not what you serve after all. She is.
On balance, that actually made him feel a lot better.
“You can’t tell because they’re all cheering for us,” Tiago said. “But there is a certain sort of Necropolitan who cheers every time that flash happens, every two hours, and it’s fucking annoying.”
Ofelia picked a petal from the felt trench of her bicorne. “You stop hearing it eventually.”
Seth leaned over his shoulder to the carriage’s front window and gave it a soft knock. “You don’t have to come out,” he said. “But these people are cheering for the saviors of the continent, and that includes you.”
The curtain twitched. Riccana’s drawn face was visible in its dark interior. “That’s nice of you to say.”
“Also,” Seth said. “Tiago’s had his hat on backwards for five minutes and hasn’t noticed.”
A pause. The curtain moved another half-inch. “It is on backwards.”
“It’s shameful. Somebody should tell him.”
“No,” Riccana said. “Let him find out in the papers.”
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Vivat a Nekropoli. Vivat a Legia Aeterna.