Arc 4: Chapter 7: Fellow Feeling
The marions closed in on us, clicking and rattling like huge insects of brass and wood. Their eyeless faces seemed disturbingly aware, and the sounds they made were almost communicative, like they coordinated amongst themselves with some abstracted language. Most hung suspended in the air as though on unseen strings.
I suspected those strings were Lias’s power, some Art used to grant his puppets greater mobility. I felt Emma at my back as a concentration of heat and nerves, knew she was afraid and doing her best to control it.
I’d brought her into this.
I’d faced marions before. They came in all sorts of forms, and were animated through various means. Some used Art, while others bound the shades of the dead into constructs, using necromancy to animate them. Sometimes they acted as vessels for willing fey spirits, not unlike how gargoyles gained life. They could be made out of metal, out of rope and wood, or even sackcloth and straw. Anything capable of locomotion would serve.
The Church had enforced stricter laws about them after Lyda’s Plague, when the Old Inquisition had used them as instruments of capture and torture, but they’d persisted in various forms despite the taboo. The Recusants had fielded whole platoons of them during the war, using them as shock troops and assassins.
They were deadly foes. Fearless, spider-fast, difficult to destroy. Their complex frames could hide any number of lethal weapons, from blades to noxious alchemical fumes.
But my attention went past the dolls, to the will behind them. Some pieces began to settle into place in my mind.
When I’d arrived in the city, I’d had to deliberately track Lias down in order to speak to him directly. He’d set me to work with little explanation or preparation, hidden his own schemes and circumstances, even his whereabouts. He’d acted through proxies and liaisons. At the time, it had made sense — it had annoyed me, but I thought I understood the reasons.
A very different picture formed before me now. Had he really trusted me so little? Had he believed that I’d side with Rosanna if I’d known about their feud? It must have seemed to him like I had. Even still, this seemed like a very extreme response, if he believed I’d come to take him into custody.
Something still seemed off. The pieces didn’t all add up.
But if I was wrong…