Sky Joust- The Purple Onion vs The Pestilence Read online

  SKY JOUST:

  The Purple Onion vs. The Pestilence

  A novel by Will Madden

  SQUARE STRAW PRESS

  Nashville, TN

  Contents

  Inscription

  Episode One: A Prelude to Wailing

  Episode Two: The Bawlling at Daggett Bend

  Episode Three: Lamentation on the Light Rail

  Episode Four: Pouring Tears In Prismton

  Episode Five: The Keening at Club Towers

  Episode Six: The Sniveling in the Spiders' Den

  Episode Seven: The Howling at Home

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Who has reminded me of my crimes?

  For in his sight, none is innocent, not even

  the infant who has lived but a day upon this earth.

  Who has reminded me? What were my crimes,

  for which I hung upon the breast and wept?

  Yay, it was the Purple Onion who reminded me,

  and I wept like goddamn fool.

  —Augustine of Hippo

  EPISODE ONE: A Prelude to Wailing

  MOONLIHGT SHINED THROUGH the ruined dome of the abandoned church. Its broad arc, vaulted high above the chancel, once bore a glittering mosaic of obsidian glass. Today, it lay below in shattered pieces, destroyed in the nineteenth century by the wrath of cannons.

  Around the circular altar, three riders sat reverently upon their mounts. They held torches, the flickering tongues of flame offering a halo of warmth in the frosty mountain air. In leather pants and boots, the men had stripped to the waist. Their faces and chests were covered in war paint. Across the expanse of their shoulders and backs, each displayed a richly colored heraldic tattoo: a wildebeest, a heron, a judge.

  The horses wore their best barding, the traditional hock-length ceremonial silks of equestrian church dress. No services had been held here in generations.

  The torchlight crackled. Vapor billowed from the nostrils of man and animal alike.

  “Why can’t we just meet at the pub?” said the rider with the wildebeest tattoo. The stockiest of the three, he sat upon a horse in red barding. From the half-moon of his balding scalp, a dark tangle of hair fell to his shoulders.

  Upon a blue-barded horse, a second rider stirred—the judge. “Favor your tongue, Sir Abhoc,” he said. As in, give it a rest. Shut up. This was the tall one, whose well-muscled body bore the most signs of disciplined training.

  “But we’re missing the damn game, Sir Heckley!” Abhoc retorted. “The Pharaohs play the Knockjocks at home tonight. Mark Savory is pitching.”

  Heckley had TiVoed it but didn’t want to invite Abhoc over to watch it with him. “Lord Brum wants to show us something,” he said instead.

  “I don’t know why he can’t show us in town,” said the other.

  “Horses are banned in town, Sir Abhoc,” Heckley replied quietly. His mount snorted beneath him. Idiot, as if to say.

  “Or why there can’t be hot wings! Has anyone told Lord Brum what a pain in the ass it is to dress a horse?”

  “We’re Horsefolk,” said Heckley with dignity.

  “Well, is he? Does he know I can’t just throw all this barding in the washing machine when I get home?”

  “You just need a bigger appliance,” said Heckley.

  Torchlight crackled. Leather creaked in the saddle.

  “That’s not what your wife told me last night,” stated Abhoc, leering.

  “Aw now,” Heckley shot back, “she always did do too much charity work.” He smiled over at their third, a smaller freckle-faced man whose saddle seemed to swallow him. “Isn’t that right, Sir Bubo?”

  Bubo startled, surprised to hear his name. His horse wore green; he, the heron. “Yes, of course, Sir Heckley. Although if it helps, Sir Abhoc, I can procure an industrial-sized washer/dryer for church use. It’ll have space-age deep-cleaning technology, and we can remote access it from the Cloud!”

  Abhoc blinked. “We’re talking about Sir Heckley’s wife, Sir Bubo.” For him, false-bragging about diddling each other’s women was a sacred rite of chivalry.

  “Well . . .” Bubo shifted in his seat. “She can use it, too, of course.”

  Abhoc reached for his sword. “Listen here, you little punk.”

  Heckley guffawed. “Christ’s spurs! Our quartermaster here has technobabble on the brain. He doesn’t care about any box unless they built it in a lab somewhere. Or any joke unless it’s got bleep blorp in it.”

  Abhoc reconsidered killing Bubo. “Blorpity bleep,” he growled, testing him.

  “Ha ha,” said Bubo, trying to smile.

  “See?” said Heckley. “He thinks it’s funny.”

  “Bloop, choo-weet!” said Bubo, flailing his arms about like a robot, laughing for sheer terror.

  Abhoc nodded respectfully. “Aw, that’s all right now. No harm done,” he said. “But listen, I’m still going to kill you.” In the moonlight, steel flashed from his scabbard.

  A loud whinny startled them. At the far end of the church, a fourth mount appeared in the collapsed doorway: a monstrous destrier, almost twenty hands high, bedecked in gold barding and bearing a knight sized to match. Guided by a steady hand, the animal sidestepped the fallen lintel. Hoofbeats hammered on wooden boards strewn with stale hay and begrimed with mountain dirt windblown through broken windows.

  Beneath his chin, the newcomer played a mournful fiddle. On approach, the rider paused to play to the ghosts of the congregation, who appeared fleetingly in moonlit dust swirls at the hitching posts where their mounts had stood for mass. Written for brass horns, the melody once had made heaven quake in counterpoint to the thunder of hooves upon the earth, as the Horsefolk rode hard and dauntless into the maw of British artillery. Tonight, its melancholy advance upon the midnight charger felt almost unbearably slow.

  At last, Lord Brum reached the circle of torchlight in the chancel. Long blond hair fell in curls past his shoulders and upon the body of the instrument.

  Letting the final note attenuate into silence, Brum leaned from his horse and hawked phlegm upon the floor.

  He began to play in earnest, the famous Tartini sonata for violin.

  The knights glanced amongst themselves. Though no more than an eighth Horsefolk by birth, Horace Brumfield had drunk the mare’s blood mixed with his mother’s milk—that’s what made him one of their faith. At his coming-of-age ceremony, he had formally renounced Dodoville heterodoxies such as the Lord Jesus rode an ass and had no squire. Upon being dubbed Knight Commander, Brum had ritually bled himself with the Sacred Spur from the “ten special tender spots”—and if that didn’t impress, he then pierced the two extra-painful ones nobody ever talked about. His commitment to their cause was absolute.

  Yet the violin, that devil’s instrument, he had not renounced that.

  He played the sonata with dazzling speed and dexterity. The knights could hear how the music lived in his fingers, tormented his dreams, scalded streaks across the heaven of his mind like fiery comets on a clear night sky.

  Brum finished. Licks of torch flame snapped in the silence.

  “How I long to play that piece among the shattered bodies of our enemies.”

  “May you get that chance, Lord Brum,” said Heckley.

  “Sooner than you think, I shall.” The Knight Commander regarded his men gravely. “In one month’s time, we ride on Dodoville. After nearly a century, she is once again ripe for plunder.”

  Abhoc shivered in the cold. “She is, m’lord, but—”

  “A millennium ago, our chivalrous ancestors rode in attendance on
our Lord and King, Jesus Harthur the Christ. They saw his powerful right arm break the strength of our enemies; they witnessed his immortal sword, Signo, dispense justice among the faithful; they wandered with him forty days and nights through the deserts of Camelot until at last, he recaptured the holy pail from which our Chosen Steeds are branned and oated. And when they opened his side and he bled into that pail, we are the direct descendants of those who drank of that blood, heirs to the covenant which makes us rightful masters of Dodoville and all the Kolkhek mountains.”

  Abhoc saw no reason this should make him miss the Pharaohs game.

  “We know all this for fact,” he said, “as we know our own names, but—”

  Brum silenced him with a glance. “You have prepared your whole lives to reclaim our marauding rights. Your skills as horsemen are unequaled. The least of you can thread a needle with your lances at a gallop. The terrible hoof-fall of your mounts at full charge make the earth itself cry for mercy. ”

  “Excepting none but you, my lord,” said Heckley proudly, “I’d brave any man alive at the joust. But centuries have passed since the Horsefolk inspired dread in this region. Alas, what use are horses against the armored cars of the Dodoville Police?”

  Brum’s face, inscrutable under his mustaches, picked Heckley apart.

  “Well asked,” he said at last. He lifted an arm toward the shattered dome above. “This is no longer merely the abandoned place of worship of our foreriders. Welcome to the fully mechanized war stable of the New Order of Horselords. Officially open for business.”

  Out in the woods beyond the crumbling walls, frogs and crickets continued their night song.

  “Brum, have you—?”

  “Gone mad? No. I just haven’t pushed the button yet.”

  Brum reached into his saddlebag and fished out a small remote. With his massive forefinger, he compressed the device, a hollow plastic clack. Nothing happened.

  Bubo’s mount, sensing her rider’s apprehension, began to fret. The smaller knight patted her neck, whispering reassurance in her ear as his wide eyes surveyed the ceiling.

  “Maybe put it under your chin,” suggested Abhoc. “Sometimes it amplifies the signal, I dunno why.”

  The remote disappeared under Brum’s mustaches. Somewhere, a low-decibel, high-frequency ping.

  Heckley steadied his charger as the floorboards began to move.

  “Sir Abhoc,” shouted the Knight Commander over the rumble, “you may throw out your mount’s barding if its upkeep has become a chore. Today, I have something you are going to like a lot better.”

  On the other side of Dodoville, snug in the rocky embrace of Mt. Myrtle, the Cumin family estate enjoyed a natural shelter from the volcano’s ashen breath. On this rocky ground, the British occupiers had built Davy Castle in the nineteenth century, a basalt fortress to serve imperial administrators as a sanctuary from the local horrors—geothermal, zoological, but chiefly anthropomorphic—that plagued her majesty’s holdings in the Kolkhek region, far away at the end of the earth.

  After the First World War, when Dodoville got swept into the newly independent nation of Sporqia, Davy Castle remained the city’s repository for learning and culture. Whatever marvels and delights were channeled in from across the globe—be they fashion, technology, or the trendiest new exercise videos—you might say they hoarded them all in there.

  Atop the west spire stood the Cumin Observatory. The ash which Mt. Myrtle, one the world’s largest active volcanoes, belched into the atmosphere made for an unreliable view of the cosmos. But the acoustic telescope, an engineering feat named Ladybird that peeked from the orbiting dome, pointed not skyward but down the mountain into Dodoville.

  On an exercise mat by the chief observation desk, Victor Cumin divided his attention between dozens of monitors accessing closed-circuit television feeds from all over the city. He was doing burpees in a pair of running shorts and trainers.

  The screens supplied views from inside police stations, the trade floors of the Tchotchke Consortium, even the conference rooms of his own newspapers under the Cumin Media umbrella. Cutting-edge kinetophonic algorithms rapidly converted subtle motion in the video into audio reconstructions, which he could patch into by calling out the monitor’s ID number.

  Thanks to the digital network set in place by the Consortium’s Cultural Archive Initiative, a pioneer in the field of invasive surveillance, you could now make yourself digitally present practically anywhere in Dodoville, so long as you had the resources and technological wherewithal.

  For everything else, there was Ladybird here, whose audio point-and-snoop capabilities could penetrate most walls.

  Squat, kick out, push up, jump! Squat, kick out, push up, jump!

  Maintaining high-level cognitive function during intense physical exertion wasn’t just a nice trick: for Dodoville’s premier masked vigilante, it was his only chance for survival.

  Plus, keeping his body in peak condition and monitoring criminal activity throughout the city put such constraints on his time, it really behooved him to do both at once. Afterward, he still had his ailing father’s media empire to run!

  Where the hell was his butler, Mori? He could at least come up here and throw swords at him or something.

  “To keep your strength up, sir,” said a voice.

  Victor glanced back mid-squat as Mori approached with long smooth bounds, landing lightly on his bare toes. The single tail of his tuxedo rippled like a gymnast’s ribbon behind his only leg. In his hands, he carried a covered silver tray.

  Mori stopped beside Victor, and with a little bob at the knee, removed the lid. Vegetable soup. Not a single drop had spilled.

  “Leave it on the desk there,” said Victor, tucking his knees on level with Mori’s eyes at the apex of his jumps.

  As a skiapod, Mori moved with more speed and agility on one leg than most people could with two. Since humans had hunted skiapods like Mori across the millennia, naturally they had developed a skill for avoiding notice. Nonetheless, Victor didn’t like being snuck up on in his own castle. Perception was as vital for a vigilante’s survival as stealth was for the skiapod!

  “Do you require my assistance, sir?” Mori smiled. Eyes the size of apples beamed at Victor beneath a broad forehead. According to Mori, skiapods had evolved childlike faces to make it difficult for less stone-hearted humans to slay them. But mostly it just creeped Victor out.

  Squat, kick out, push up, jump! How many was that? Also, what was he watching on the monitors?

  Oh right.

  “Mori, did you know spider silk is stronger than steel? Plus, triple the blast protection of kevlar.”

  The butler’s single eyebrow rose in surprise. “I have only a hobbyist’s interest in organic chemistry, Master Victor. But yes, I did know. It’s flexible too. That’s why its the primary material in the Violet Storm’s body armor.”

  “Ugh! I wear that stuff against my skin. What’s the secondary material?”

  “Sir, if you enjoy not getting fatally shot, stabbed, burned, bludgeoned, electrocuted, or irradiated, may I wholeheartedly suggest not insisting upon an answer to that question.”

  “What’s grosser than spider webbing?” Victor glared at him. “Mori!”

  “Skin, sir.” A tilt of the head for I-told-you-so.

  “Blech. At least it’s not human skin.”

  The smile on Mori’s face didn’t change.

  “Did you ever consider applying the silk like a shrink wrap?” Victor asked.

  “I confess the thought occurred to me, sir, but I decided you were still capable of dressing yourself.”

  Mori’s childlike face made his dry sense of humor seem slightly deranged.

  “Ever think of using the spider silk on animals?” shouted Victor as he did a backflip for some reason.

  “You weren’t planning on riding one of the hunting terriers into combat, were you?”

  “How about a horse?”

  “That’s a lot of spider silk.”
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  “Where do we get ours? Do we import it?”

  Mori closed his eyes for an instant. “All our silk, sir, is local. From Ariadne’s Arachnophilia Euphorium.”

  “Emporium, you mean?”

  “They are very enthusiastic about spiders there, sir.”

  Sweat glistened along Victor’s hairline. “I wonder how an operation like that turns a profit,” he said.

  “It’s not vigilantism in a vegetable mask, sir, but they do make a living.”

  Mid-burpee, Victor stopped doing burpees.

  “Did you fashion my breathing apparatus out of a turnip or something?”

  “No, sir. But following the specifications you gave me, well . . . Some of the writers at your newspaper have observed it looks sort of like . . .”

  “What?”

  “Some . . . vegetable. One of the more fear-striking ones, I presume.”

  Victor reached for a towel and walked over to the desk where he opened the file on the Church of the Knight Errant.

  “Horace Brumfield,” he said. “Named Knight Commander of the CKE three years ago. Ramped up their training programs in dressage and medieval weaponry, especially lancing.”

  “The Brumfields, I recall, were one of the losing families in the gang war that overthrew the Botanists from political supremacy back in the ‘90s.”

  “That’s right. All their power and prestige vanished overnight. Perhaps Horace wants revenge.”

  Mori shrugged. “If it makes sense to a human mind, sir. Skiapods believe that dramatic reversals of fortune are simply a part of life. The rich among us cheerfully joke about the day when they will be penniless.”

  “Well, of course it’ll come if they make jokes about it!”

  “I don’t understand, sir,” Mori said smiling.

  “The Horsefolk have ravaged the Kolkhek mountains since before the founding of Dodoville. They are our oldest enemy.”

  Mori tilted his head cheerfully. “Since the obsolescence of the war horse, the population has mostly assimilated into Dodoville society. Law-abiding, tax-paying citizens. Veterans of the Zahzian War. Nice people, if you trust reputation.”