#43 Anatomy of a Rose
Lady Beauvoir scowled. Licking the sweet blood off her fingers, she looked down at the remains of the bleeding rose she had picked apart. Her mind was fogged with angry frustration yet right now she needed clarity more than ever.
Thirty five petals lay oozing blood onto the table. She had counted them and there were certainly many more than three. When the Pontifex Surrexit had said, "No rose has three petals" surely he hadn't meant the False Apostle's soul was in thirty five parts? If so, her ambition to control the united Rose seemed hopeless. If only the pompous creature would deign to speak plainly for once!
Suddenly she had found her plans unravelling and she was furious, for Lady Beauvoir did not take well to being wrong. First, the attempted reunification of her conjectured 'Trinity of the Rose' had proved to be a fool's errand. The Hermit of Barfunweltz had retreated to his cell to wallow in deranged theological despair, but it was inevitable that he and the Revivalist would align themselves with the Pontifex now.
Second, she had now played her 'prophetic fulfilment' card with the Raptured Court, and no longer enjoyed any useful status in their collective delusion. Even what little influence she had had over the Flesh-Eaters was ebbing away.
Third and perhaps most alarming, her actions had raised unwelcome interest in her scheming from Lady Olynder. The Mortarch of Grief appeared to have taken direct control of the Procession of the Foolish Martyrs. Furthermore, Beauvoir's agent Marchioness Weiß had informed her that Olynder's consort Kurdoss Valentian had also been spotted in Barfunweltz.
She glowered at the prospect of reporting all this to Queen Neferata. She would need to think carefully about how to avoid being blamed for these setbacks. She would have happily pointed the finger at the idiotic Lord Voltaire but he was of course already detained at Neferata's displeasure. (She wondered fleetingly what punishments her testimony might have brought upon him.)
Nonetheless, she did have one other thread to investigate which might prove interesting: the inscription Paule Wieß had found on Barfun Moor. She would have dismissed it as insignificant had it not resonated with a passage she had read in the old journals of the False Apostle she had found here in Barfunweltz Manse. He had written obscurely of a ‘thorn in his side’ alongside a mention of something (or someone, or somewhere) called ‘Kaphool’. It was quite possibly an irrelevant coincidence, but she had an instinctual feeling that they were somehow linked.
Perhaps Queen Neferata herself might have intelligence that could cast some light on that puzzle. She picked up her quill, dipped it in the sticky blood still oozing from the rose petals, and began to pen her report.
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