He could relieve them about this new violation of privacy at the same time.
*
The stinging crack of taidyo against target brought several curious observers to the courtyard. A few laughed indulgently and went away, but others stayed to watch. Aldric didn’t object, since whatever news they carried to Lord Geruath would serve as an unsubtle warning that at least one of his guests could take care of himself. But not as well as he should, for a muscle spasm high in his shoulder betrayed cramps from lack of proper use. Lack of practice, lack of exercise, lack of too many things. He treated the arm gently as he moved through his exercises from light staff-sword to heavy, from guard to ward to cut to thrust, working away the small pain as muscles warmed and tendons stretched, and he thought…
He thought: if only everything was so simple that a sword could solve it.
He thought: I carry life and death given form in steel, to grant or to withhold as I see fit.
And even as the thoughts flickered through his mind like the turning pages of a book, he knew they were only thoughts, not desires, not wishes, not even dreams. Death came far too easily already. No man who lay with a woman could create life as fast as a man who bore a blade could end it, and keeping ebbing life within a ruined body or death from one determined to embrace it was impossible. He knew. He had seen it happen too many times: Haranil his father and Baiart his brother, Lord Santon, Evthan Wolfsbane, even the nameless soldier poisoned in the tomb…
Aldric’s fingers flexed around the heaviest taidyo, one he had been using for half an hour until his muscles ached with effort. Both hands were on the long hilt and the chequer-cut pattern of its grip bit into his palms. He was sweating far more now than when he left Lord Geruath, but it was honest sweat born of exertion, not stress. The length of polished oak poised above his head in the Eagle’s Guard and his tensed arms, his body, even his spirit quivered with a craving for release.
He thought, and the thought was cold: What is a sword? A symbol of honour, of rank, or just of death? The past can’t be undone. The spoken word and the loosed arrow and the swung blade can’t be recalled. You can never turn back time. You can never go home again…
The taidyo became a blur, sweeping down in a perfect Eagle’s Strike against the wooden target. It had endured more than two hours of constant battering but now it split asunder along a raw-edged gouge as straight as the stroke of a razor. Slivers pattered against the sand as it twisted, then sagged backwards like something newly dead.
A small smile crossed Aldric’s face as he heard the murmuring provoked by his final cut. All the fury bottled up inside him had disappeared, channelled from his body through the wooden sword into the wooden target. And into destruction. That was how Duergar Vathach had died, burned and blasted by the dark forces of hatred held too long in check…
“Enough,” he said and laid the notched, dented taidyo aside.
She waited an arm’s length from where he stood, resting on a simple pine rack, patient as the night awaiting dawn, stark black and gleaming against the grained, blond wood.
Isileth Widowmaker.
Aldric made a small bow before he lifted the taiken, respecting her twenty centuries of age and the purpose for which she was forged all those long years ago. Some swords were made for ornament, others for parade; this one was for killing. He unwrapped the scabbard’s shoulder-strap from where it coiled like a serpent below the complex hilt, looped it over his head and made the longsword secure on the weapon-belt at his left hip. The touch of his fingers when he settled her weight was a caress such as one might use to stroke a favoured hawk.
A man had said once, years past, that Aldric loved his sword as he might love a woman. That had been an insult, answered with violence, but in Widowmaker’s case it was true. Almost true, anyway, and perhaps not love, but trust more absolute than he had given any human being since Kyrin walked away.
Ignoring the critical eyes across the courtyard which followed his every move, he made the drawing cut called the Boar’s Strike, out from the scabbard and diagonally up across an invisible enemy’s belly. At the top of the sweep his left hand joined the right in Falcon’s Guard then brought Isileth down onto that enemy’s opposite shoulder, two cuts that flowed together in a single precise, controlled and seemingly effortless sweep. Both had taken less than half a second, and each had enough focussed force to open a human torso to the backbone.
Aldric had seen it. He had done it.
He knew when Geruath Segharlin entered the practice yard, with no need to see the men on the fringes of his vision coming to attention or making their bows. His strange and unreliable sixth sense of warning had alerted him before all that, for the Overlord’s presence and his gaze wasn’t just a mental shadow. It was more like a physical pressure between the shoulder-blades. He turned slowly, matching Geruath unwinking stare for stare, and it was the Jouvaine who looked away first. Then, and only then, Aldric slid Widowmaker out of sight. There was something almost modest in the way he sheathed her blade, as a lover might cloak his lady to preserve her from the lewd gaze of passers-by. But his right hand remained around her hilt.
“Good afternoon to you, my lord,” he said, and his bow was a studied hairsbreadth short of true politeness or real insult. Aldric had no patience left for the hypocrisies of false courtesy.
Overlord Geruath may have realised as much, for his own bow was impeccable. Someone had perhaps advised him about what eijin were: high-clan warriors who for reasons of their own had set aside their ranks and titles, and with them most of the restrictions of law or honour. They were men as careless of their own lives as those of others, and stories painted them in dark colours, the crimson of blood and the black which Aldric wore. Such simple portrayals weren’t entirely true. But they weren’t entirely false.
“Kourgath-an, I wish to speak with you.” Geruath used good Alban with the proper honorific, and his voice was as suave as a courtier’s.
“Again? Then speak. My lord.” Aldric tacked the title on as a studied afterthought, but Geruath ignored its rudeness.
“In private.”
“This is private enough for me, my lord. What word in particular had you in mind?”
“The word is ‘taiken’.” Geruath had more sense than to reach out for the object of his desire, even though the longsword was close enough to touch. Aldric watched him, deciding how many severed fingers would count as a reasonable response. “That taiken.” The finger he used for pointing wasn’t one at risk. Not yet. “I offer you a thousand Imperial crowns for it.”
“The Empire’s currency has become a little debased of late.” Aldric chose his words with the care of someone picking strawberries from a patch overgrown with nettles. “It no longer has my confidence. So no crowns, my lord, not even if the sword was for sale. Which it isn’t. I already told your Kortagor Jervan I’m no sellsword. The most I do is hire.” He might have saved his breath, for Geruath let the quiet refusal go by unheeded.
“Then the same in Alban deniers.”
The Overlord of Seghar had just confessed to a total stranger that he possessed a small fortune in gold coins. He might have been lying, but Aldric doubted it. The money was available somewhere close, or Geruath wouldn’t have used it as an enticement. A thousand deniers was the hire of a fair-sized contingent of mercenaries, and here it was being offered for a sword by this petty lord of a backwoods fief. The whole business stank of corruption like a month-dead sheep in summertime. And where did the demon fit into it all? First a werewolf in the woods, now this thing somewhere in the citadel. Aldric didn’t like the images taking shape in his mind, and liked still less the words that came with them.
Issaqua sings the song of desolation
And I know that I am lost
And none can help me now…
What, he wondered, would Geruath’s reaction be to hearing those words spoken? Or would Crisen understand their meaning better? He shook his head to dislodge them as if he had walked into a cobweb, and th
e Overlord took his gesture for refusal.
“Two thousand then. Or five. I can offer ten if you’re prepared to wait.”
“I don’t care about your money, my lord. It makes you think No means Maybe. I’m not interested, and No means No.”
Geruath considered the refusal for a protracted second, then tried to seize Aldric’s arm and missed. The younger man snapped one step backwards, right hand crossing, gripping, drawing. Isileth Widowmaker leapt from her scabbard, and not all the swords of all the retainers who sprang forward in that instant could have saved Geruath from the cut that hovered unfinished at his neck.
“Be advised, my lord.” Aldric’s voice was as harsh as the grating of stones. “Call off your vassals.” The longsword gleamed as he shifted position. “Now!”
Lord Geruath glared down from his full gaunt height at the Alban’s expressionless face, reading nothing from it and seeing his own death reflected in the taiken. He gestured to his guards with one hand, and they fell back.
“There’s no danger,” he told them, even though both voice and hand were shaking. “Merely a… A demonstration of technique. Nothing more.”
“Thank you, my lord,” said Aldric, and bowed. As he straightened, he waited for the inevitable parting shot that came only after the Overlord had walked a little out of reach, but not yet out of earshot. Men like Geruath Segharlin always liked to have the last word.
“Kourgath-eijo,” said Geruath, “you may yet give me your blade, freely and of your own will.” Aldric smiled at last, brief and chilly as a crack in ice.
“Surely you must have noticed, my lord. I almost did.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
The gardens of Seghar were no more than a memory. Only the scent of flowers remained, and that too had changed. Uncared-for, it was overly rich, nauseatingly sweet and had a faint, foul underlay of rot. But what Gueynor saw as she walked through the confusion of weeds and dying plants was a ten-year memory, and it was enough.
“I am Gueynor Evenou,” she said in bitter reminder. “I am the daughter of Lord Erwan Evenou, and the true-born ruler of this desolation.”
The building on top of a small hill had once been a roofed summer-house, overlooking what had once been a view. This had been her secret realm when she was six years old, and at first sight it was untouched by the ruin which surrounded it. That was before she reached its veranda and saw the doors hanging from their hinges, the shattered filigree of the windows, the damp white moulds and fungi that exist on rottenness crawling across its wooden walls. The stink of decay prickled at her nostrils and, away for once from Aldric’s well-meant cynicism, she felt free to weep.
“Yes, lady, it deserves your tears,” said a voice where none should have been. “This was once a pleasant place.” Gueynor turned, startled, to where Kortagor Jervan stood outlined in the doorway, no longer armoured but dressed simply in boots, breeches and a belted tunic. He gestured at the garments and gave her a smile that might have been shy, or something else entirely. “Every soldier comes off duty sometimes, even garrison commanders. My lieutenant has the afternoon watch.”
“But why come here?”
“Because I like to. I knew these gardens when they were gardens and not wasteland.” Jervan paused, looked at her. “And because I saw you.”
“Why would that be of interest?”
“I have eyes, and the wit to use them. You interest me Mistress, er, Aline. You interest me a great deal.” Gueynor stared at him and wished Aldric Talvalin was here, cynicism and all, because he carried sharp steel as well as a sharp tongue. She hadn’t so much as a dagger.
“In what way do I interest you, garrison commander Jervan?”
“In many ways.” He moved out of the doorway to leave her escape route clear, “Except the one you seem afraid of. I’m a married man. Oh, that doesn’t make me immune to lust, since I’m ‘a beast in armour’ – or are we called something else nowadays? But when a man has two daughters of his own, it can sometimes change how he looks at the daughters of other men.”
“Sometimes?” echoed Gueynor warily.
“I see them and my wife just once a year. Once a year for the past two years, then back to this dung-heap where…” His eyes searched her face and were satisfied by what they saw there. “Where two mad gamecocks compete for the heights to crow from. Despite his faults, your father was sane.” Gueynor managed to limit her response to a quizzical stare and brows raised in curiosity.
“How could an Imperial officer know anything about a peasant huntsman?”
“Masterfully done!” Jervan grinned and clapped his hands. “Such control!” The amusement faded from his bearded face almost at once, and again Gueynor wished she was armed. “You recognised me, that evening at the gate. Didn’t you?” There was no point in denying it now, and Gueynor nodded.
“Just so. Half-familiar faces pass in and out every day with a set of features, a way of wearing hair, a style of walking that wakens echoes of seeing it before. Mostly they’re just coincidence or imagination, but you…” Jervan nodded at her. “You knew me, and the way you showed it made me sure I knew you too, but I couldn’t remember where or when. Until I sat awake thinking about it for most of last night. The thing about having daughters is that I’ve seen how a girl changes as she grows. You’ve changed considerably, but you’re not as old or worldly as your painted face suggests, and at long last I remembered the child who left by the Westgate with her uncle, that day ten years ago…”
“Who else knows?” Gueynor’s voice was very small.
“Nobody.” The kortagor laughed. It was a short bark of mirth as if length of laughter was controlled by regulations. “That kind of puzzling is best done alone, or even the politest fellow officers start to wonder.” He tapped his head. “There’s a saying current in Seghar garrison: ‘such-and-such is getting lordly’. It’s an insult. They don’t say crazy now, nor insane, not even plain and simple mad. Just lordly. They’re just troopers, ordinary men, not very clever – but not stupid either, mind you… What I mean is, they’re not witty, not quick with words. But whichever of them coined that description knew exactly what he was trying to say.”
“We saw the Overlord this morning.”
“Then you understand.”
“I do.” Gueynor took a deep breath and discovered she was no longer afraid. Whatever Jervan intended to do, he would do whether she was scared or not, and she wanted to find out what it might be. The best way to find out, as Aldric had taught her, was to ask. “Commander Jervan, please come to the point.” He saluted and didn’t grin to dilute it.
“You’re also growing lordly, but not in the fashion meant by my soldiers. Very well, Lady… Gainore?”
“Gueynor.”
“Gueynor. The records were in dialect, not spelt as it’s spoken. How much do you know of what has been happening here?”
“Crisen’s consort was a sorcerer who made a mistake in a spell and got killed because of it. Those bare bones are all I’ve heard. People in Seghar don’t talk much to strangers.”
“Or to anyone else, not about subjects like that. What you heard is close enough. Lady Gueynor, what I—” When Jervan broke off to peer out of the summerhouse, Gueynor realised he wore a long, broad-bladed knife in a sheath across the small of his back. That discovery didn’t frighten her as much as it might have done. It was for show more than use, unlike the murderous small daggers Aldric favoured, too big and with fittings too ornate for a concealed weapon. There was even a hunting-scene tooled into the leather of its sheath. “The advantage of this place,” he said, turning back, “is that it gives an excellent view of landscapes and flower-beds. Also of anyone in them.”
“You command here, so why should you worry?”
“Hear me out then ask again.” He pointed to a seat running round three of the small building’s five walls. “That’s not as dirty as it looks, so sit down. What I have to talk about may take time.”
“What do have you to talk about?”
&n
bsp; “Conspiracy, usurpation and treason, though the words vary depending on who uses them. You may have a kinder vocabulary. I hope you do.”
There was no deliberate threat in the way Jervan spoke but, taken together with his subject, Gueynor couldn’t be sure. Once again she wished Aldric was with her, an armed presence to make anyone think twice. She wondered where he was and what he was doing, then set the thought aside as Jervan began to explain the situation in Seghar.
*
Aldric was immersed to the neck in water so hot that the slightest movement teetered between pleasure and pain.
He had wanted a bath before Geruath arrived in the exercise yard, but there was something about the Overlord’s craving for his sword which left him feeling grubbier than all the sweat of exercise. Dewan ar Korentin would have made a filthy joke about it and prompted an embarrassed laugh to make him feel better, but Dewan wasn’t here. The same sensation meant he had taken Isileth Widowmaker apart for a thorough cleaning. Pommel, guards and grip were freshly polished, the long smoke-grey blade oiled, and even the gleaming silvery edges stroked a time or two with a whetstone. Now, with the buckskin bag that contained the Echainon spellstone hung from her crossguard, the taiken waited for the next time she could leave her scabbard and dance with Aldric’s enemies.
He stared at the sword through whorls of steam, seeing neither steel nor leather, just considering what he had done. Facing down a provincial Overlord in his own home and before his own men was rash enough. He had also thrown away any chance of using Geruath as his means of introduction to Goth and Bruda. Whatever Gueynor’s plans might be for the Overlord, his favour had been vital to King Rynert’s mission. Half-demented or not, the lord of Seghar still carried a thousand times more weight within the Empire than any Alban ever could, and without him Aldric’s duty to his king was fraught with difficulty and risk. Without Geruath’s formal introduction he was as likely to meet an Imperial Prokrator or a Lord General as to fly rings around the moon.
The Demon Lord Page 21