“You shouldn’t have hit me.” Aldric touched the livid mark, not accusing, just stating the painfully obvious. “You’re Cernuan. You should know better. Kailinin aren’t hit by anyone, not even by their lords. Never.” He was thinking now about Widowmaker, about the blinding speed with which he could draw that long starsteel blade, and about some day in the future when a reflex action outpaced the second thoughts that should have stopped it. “I apologise for what happened. All of it. For what I said, and what we both did.” He gave Marek an apologetic little bow and in the same motion returned the dagger to its sheath in his boot, then took a deep breath. “But I think, I’m almost sure, that what happened in the citadel was no accident. She was killed to keep her quiet.”
“Why?”
“Because of me and what I am. What I really am, not what I pretend to be.”
“And where does the other girl – Gueynor, or Aline, or whatever she calls herself – come into all this?”
“She doesn’t. That matter’s separate and private—”
“So keep your pudgy fingers off, eh?” Marek managed a laugh that earned him a thoughtful look and the ghost of a smile.
“At least you’re getting your sense of humour back.”
“If I didn’t laugh—”
“You’d cry?”
“I’d go mad.” There was such sincerity in the demon-queller’s words that Aldric subsided again. He turned away and fussed with Lyard for a while, gentling him with a buzz of nonsense that required no thought on his part.
“I’m glad Crisen Geruath wants you to destroy this… Whatever it is. I hadn’t credited him with that much sense.” There was an expression on the Cernuan demon-queller’s face with no right to be there, and Aldric’s eyes narrowed. “That is what he wants, isn’t it?” Marek stared at the stable floor and pushed a single stray wisp of hay back and forth, back and forth with the toe of his boot.
“Not – not quite destroy…”
“Then what in the nine hot Hells does he want?” For the horse’s sake Aldric held his impatient shout in check, but it required a conscious effort and anger still thrummed behind the words because he was afraid he already knew the answer.
He was right.
“He wants it captured. Tamed. Broken to his will like a horse. And he thinks I can do it.”
“But you can’t, can you?” Marek shook his head. “Then don’t you think you ought to tell him? Or do you want to end up the way Sedna did?”
“What the Geruaths want, they usually get.”
“This time they may get more than they expect.” Aldric walked to the stable door and looked out, at where the Overlord’s tower reared its stark outline against the star-shot summer sky. “He must be insane.”
“I’ve seen him, Aldric. He is. They both are, in their different ways. And that’s why I daren’t refuse. Not openly. Not yet.”
*
The apartments set aside for them in the citadel of Seghar were much superior to those at The Crossed Pikes, but Aldric doubted he would sleep any better. There were too many guards, though few in the Imperial harness worn by Kortagor Jervan. The sentries he had seen were part-time troops, a militia made up from the citadel servants and paraded before him to impress by numbers alone. He had been more impressed by their core of mercenaries, the Drusalans and the Tergovans Gueynor had mentioned. He had already met a few of those in the chieftain’s burial mound. But there weren’t enough to justify the amount of Alban gold which had passed within these walls.
Aldric had a fair idea of what stipend the Lords of Seghar received to foment rebellions against Grand Warlord Etzel. Now he knew where the Geruath sympathies lay, he had expected to see traces of misspent wealth: opulent furnishings, luxurious buildings, a well-equipped retinue and other evidence of extravagance. Yet there was nothing. The citadel close up looked even more dilapidated than from a distance. It was as if Alba’s funds were going somewhere else, and that was strange because all the records claimed it had come here. And then vanished.
Stranger still was Lord Geruath himself.
They had barely unpacked the few belongings in their respective rooms when they were commanded – courteously, Aldric noted with a kailin’s eye for such niceties, but still ordered rather than invited – into the presence of the Overlord of Seghar. That presence wasn’t imposing, for Lord Geruath was gaunt, scrawny to the point of emaciation, but he endeavoured to counter his physical insignificance with the first truly splendid clothes Aldric had seen so far. If those garments had been only half as rich they would have been twice as magnificent, for they were so overdone as to be ridiculous. As with his clothes, the Overlord had shown no restraint with perfumes and the mingled scents of musk and civet, lavender and roses hung around him so heavily they were almost visible.
Beneath it all was a man of middle age, sick in mind and body and terrified of growing old. Lord Geruath’s hair might well have been a distinguished iron-grey or dark on top with elegant tags of silver at his temples. Instead it had been dyed a hard, unreal black, sleek as polished leather, and to match its mock-youthful darkness the lord’s face was rouged and powdered to resemble a ruddy-featured healthy man of thirty.
It should have been laughable, perverse or simply decadent, but to Aldric’s eye it was almost sad.
Geruath’s weapons were another matter. They were a matched set of long sabre, shorter fighting-knife and dagger, and their hiltwork and scabbard mounts were the most elaborate he had ever seen. That made them the most costly, for such workmanship didn’t come cheap even in plain steel, and these were gem-encrusted gold. They were works of art as much as weapons and, if their blades were equivalent quality, then apart from Isileth and two or perhaps three other ancestral high-clan taikenin noticed after the battle for Dunrath, they were the finest he had ever seen.
An Alban mercenary like the one he portrayed wouldn’t know proper local manners, so Aldric gave a punctilious Second Obeisance such as he would offer any clan-lord in his own hall. The courtesy received a curt nod, nothing more, so it seemed that Jervan had already reported his status as Marek’s bodyguard and a servant beneath noble notice. Geruath paid him no further heed and spoke instead to the demon-queller, in a Jouvaine version of the affected courtly dialect favoured by Baiart Talvalin so many years ago. That meant elaborate, meaningless flowery phrases, laced together far too infrequently with plainer words, and soon it became only an irritating background noise.
Gueynor also showed no understanding of what was being said. Her father might not have used court speech, or enough time had passed that she had forgotten what little a child could have known. She had copied Aldric’s obeisance, not just to appear a foreigner but to give herself something to do besides glare hate at Lord Geruath. It had covered her initial spasm of detestation and Aldric doubted if, at her age, he could have hidden his feelings so well. He had spent his four years of exile out of sight, being himself. She had spent her ten years in plain sight, pretending to be someone else. Except for occasional cracks in the veneer, she did it well.
If the guards around the fortress and the outer citadel had been unusually numerous, here they were unusually few despite Geruath’s fondness for ostentation. A troop in full battle armour wouldn’t have been out of place. Instead there were only two soldiers flanking the Overlord’s high seat, wearing crested coats like the boy who had come to the inn the previous night. But both carried gisarms and looked like they knew how to use them.
Seated a little way to one side was an elderly man, balding and harassed-looking. He wrote in a large, leather-bound book at great speed and with many blots, but seemed always at least two sentences in arrears of what the Lord had said. The hall scribe, Aldric guessed: an Hanan-Vlethanek, the Keeper of Years. He seemed to be making, or trying to make, a record of everything said and done here as any normal Archivist would do. But this wasn’t Alba or any normal place, it was a border province of the Drusalan Empire and one could never be sure for whose eye the information was i
ntended.
Aldric rubbed his own eye through the cloth which covered it. He had already decided it had been ‘injured’ rather than lost and was healing rapidly, because the patch was uncomfortable and even downright dangerous. He always had a blind side now, he had been startled more than once by Marek or Gueynor at his elbow when he hadn’t heard them approach, and he found distances so hard to judge that bow and telek were useless. Soon he would dab soap into the eye, a necessary evil to make it red and inflamed when he uncovered it, and after that revert to full vision again.
Soon, but not yet. That resolve was strengthened when the old scribe glanced in his direction, chewed at the frayed end of his pen and scribbled a brief description of the Lord’s guests. No, not just yet.
The walls of Geruath’s audience chamber showed where at least part of King Rynert’s gold had gone. They were filled to excess and beyond, in the overlord’s usual style, with a quantity of weapons that was too much for any room but an armoury. The array of polished wood, lacquer and enamel, the worked bronze and tooled leather and above all the steel, blued and burnished, etched and plain, would have done credit to the Hall of Archives at Dunrath, or Gemmel’s private arsenal in his labyrinthine home beneath the Blue Mountains.
Whether sword or spear, axe or mace or crossbow, all were of superb workmanship and a few, like those worn so ineffectually by Geruath, were masterpieces. Someone back in Alba, maybe ar Korentin or the king himself, had told Aldric about this, and then it had been buried by a torrent of other information. ‘He searches out old weapons,’ the forgotten voice had said, ‘and collects them in his tower at Seghar.’ Those half-remembered words should have prepared him for what happened next. Half-remembered wasn’t enough.
“Kourgath!” The sharpness in Marek Endain’s voice made Aldric realise this was the second time his supposed employer had spoken to him. Perhaps even the third…
“Sir?”
“Lord Geruath Segharlin wishes to speak with you.” Apprehension flickered beneath Marek’s neutral expression as he leaned closer, slipping momentarily from Jouvaine into Alban. “He’s being pleasant, before Heaven! No matter what happens, try to do likewise.”
Aldric wondered why the Cernuan had felt it necessary to make such a request, and wondered too what had disturbed him so much that it showed through his schooled exterior. He soon found out.
“Show me your sword,” said Geruath.
The Overlord might have sounded pleasant to Marek’s ears, but not to Aldric. Of all the elaborate courtesies which governed high-clan Albans, the most elaborate concerned taikenin. Any insult to his sword was an insult to its wearer, and any insult to its wearer was answered by his sword. Nobody demanded to see a taiken, as a man who collected weapons with Geruath’s indiscriminate passion must have known. It meant the blunt command might be a test, checking a supposed servant’s reaction to something that shouldn’t offend him. And if it was a test, Aldric failed it with a single word.
“No.”
“I want to see it,” Geruath repeated.
“No.”
“Kourgath, for the love of Heaven!” Marek was almost pleading with him, but he could sense Gueynor’s silent approval and support. “Kourgath!” the demon-queller said again. Aldric looked at him, at Gueynor, then at the Overlord.
“No.”
The exquisitely bundled, painted and perfumed apparition that was Geruath rose to his feet, his breathing coming quicker now and an unhealthy flush darkening his powdered cheeks. Bony, veined hands heavy with rings gripped the arms of his chair, clenching like a falcon on its perch except that falcons had more dignity. The storm brewed, plain in his staring eyes and flexing fingers, but it didn’t break.
“Leave me.” Instead of the expected shrillness his voice was low and almost controlled except for a tremor at the back of it. “And you,” he swung on the hall-scribe, “give me your book.” The old man sidled forward apprehensively, then cried out as Geruath snatched the Archive from his hands. Lips moving, the Overlord traced what had just been written, his finger following the words and smearing the still-wet ink.
“You’re slow on every other day, yet you wrote all this down fast enough.” The scribe cringed back, anticipating a blow, but instead Geruath gripped the latest page by its outer margin and let the heavy volume fall free. There was a momentary jerk like a hanged man reaching the end of his drop, then threads snapped, the binding gave way and the Archive thudded to the floor with the offending page left in the Overlord’s fist.
Geruath glared at it. He ignored everyone else, whether they were the old man trying to recover his book without getting too close to his lord’s feet or fists, or the two disinterested guards watching a scene played out with variations far too often. He even ignored the cause of his anger as Aldric, this time without a bow, obeyed his final order and strode from the audience chamber with Marek and Gueynor following as quickly as they dared.
Instead the Overlord flopped back into his chair and began tearing the page apart with manic care until its shredded fragments were too small for him to hold…
*
Marek Endain said nothing during the long walk back to their apartments – his mind, guessed Aldric, was far too full for words – but out of the demon-queller’s sight Gueynor had squeezed his hand. Whether she felt gratitude, or satisfaction, or merely a need for human contact, Aldric neither knew nor cared. No-one but another high-clan Alban would have understood why he put pride before expedience, but however these foreigners interpreted his actions – and in kailin-eir affairs, Marek Endain of Cerenau was a foreigner – it was most likely wrong.
It hadn’t been a show of independence, nor an insult to the Overlord for insult’s sake, nor a display of tacit support to please Gueynor. It had been because of honour, his own and that of the sword which defended it. ‘A man without honour is not a man,’ according to one old adage. What would the writer of that simplistic saying have made of his own uniquely flexible honour, or the way he was willing to twist it to suit the needs of the moment?
Aldric’s present needs were more practical than philosophical. Despite his outward calm the meeting with Geruath had left him tense and sweaty, with certain schooled responses wound as tightly as the drive-ropes of a catapult.
“Exercise,” he muttered to no one in particular, “then a hot bath. There is a proper bath-house in this mausoleum, isn’t there?” Marek neither knew nor cared, and said so. Even the way his door shut and locked behind him sounded out of sorts.
“I’ll walk in the gardens for an hour,” said Gueynor, and Aldric glanced at her.
“Why? You saw what they look like now.”
“But I remember what they looked like then. That reminds me of other things.”
“And after your walk?”
“I want to talk. Privately.” She jerked her head towards the demon-queller’s door. “And alone.” Aldric’s answering grin was a quick baring of teeth with sardonic humour in it but no real amusement.
“He has bottles in there. We won’t be disturbed.”
“Good. I—” She broke off and sent a sharp look down the right branch of the corridor crossway. Aldric had to turn his head half around before he could follow her gaze, and when he saw the servant standing idly at the far end, he realised the man could have been there all day without his knowing it. That was when he swore and tore off the eyepatch once and for all.
“Is that wise?”
“The wisest thing I’ve done so far today.” He knuckled savagely at the socket to make the eye red and justify its being covered up, trying to rub away the unfocused blur which still clouded his vision on that side. The blur became a shifting mosaic of incandescent sparks before he stopped, and when that faded the retainer was still there, watching without seeming to, listening likewise. Convenient for me, thought Aldric as he signalled the man with a peremptory gesture. Yes, you bastard, I want you here… And convenient for Geruath or whoever had set him there to spy.
“Enjoy your
walk, Aline,” he said for the servant’s benefit, pitching his voice low enough to sound like an exchange of confidences. Or intimacies. “If I’m bathing when you come back…” He let the words trail away and stroked one open hand along Gueynor’s neck.
“If you are, Kourgath, I’ll take another stroll.” She caught his wrist, turned over the hand and kissed its palm before releasing him and walking away.
“What are you staring at?” Aldric demanded when the servant got close enough. He used stilted court Drusalan, aware that a local retainer would show blank incomprehension of the language but one of the hired mercenaries—
“Nothing, lord!”
—Would understand well enough. Aldric stored his discovery away for future reference as he issued rapid instructions then, after a brief visit to his packsaddle for three taidyin – wooden staff-swords, each of a different weight – he followed the servant to a roofed courtyard near the stables. It was lined with targets for all kinds of weapons, and he had expected nothing less. Geruath Segharlin might be a crazy old man, but he wasn’t a collector whose collection was just ornamental. Every weapon on the audience chamber’s display racks had been ready for immediate use.
He had done his best to push both Lord Geruath and his as-yet-unseen son to the back of his mind, but fetching the practice swords had reminded him of them all over again. In the short period between arriving in Seghar citadel and ending that awkward interview with its lord, his saddlebags and pack had been searched, or more likely searched again after a first and second time at the town livery stable and The Crossed Pikes. This time it was so neatly done that nothing was crumpled or out of place, but the searcher’s arrogance was such that none of the bags had been closed afterwards.
Aldric had sworn under his breath, but that breath had also carried a small sigh of relief and he closed buckles and retied laces with surprisingly steady hands. This was why the Echainon stone in its leather pouch was an uncomfortable weight on a cord round his neck, and likely to stay that way. For now he was being taken on trust, accepted as what he claimed to be. If there had been any doubts at all, he would have been spied on and investigated until the truth came out. No disguise could ever withstand hard suspicion. The real trick lay in not provoking it. Though he intended to relieve his feelings about the Overlord, he would do it in a way no-one could criticise.
The Demon Lord Page 20