by David Drake
“I’m not sure I can get it back neat again,” I said. “And it’s for May.”
“I’ll rewrap it,” Irene said. “Don’t you want to see it too, Marlene?”
Marlene nodded and I handed the whole packet to Irene. She had the sacking open as neatly as the shopman had closed it up, then lifted out the scarf. It was really spiderweb thin, and a pale blush that would have vanished against any background less purely white than the skin of Irene’s throat against which she held the silk for an instant.
Both women oohed and aahed over the scarf.
“Your wife is very fortunate, Lord Pal,” Marlene said. She refolded the cloth herself before handing it to Irene, who returned it to me.
“They do very fine lace here on Midian,” I explained. “The color is from the cocoon itself, the way the worm spun it. I hope May will like it.”
I cleared my throat and added, “Ah, Lady May and I are together for the rest of my life I hope, but we’re not married. It’s customary for the Consort’s ladies in waiting to remain single, and May didn’t want marriage.”
“It’s a protection for the woman,” said Lady Irene.
“She’ll have whatever she tells me she wants,” I said, a little angry now. I hated to think that May felt she needed protection from the way I was going to treat her, but if she did, she did. I wasn’t happy with a discourteous third party implying that May did, though.
“Lord Pal?” Osbourn said, maybe to change the subject. “Could you go back in the city and show me around? I’ll like to have a meal that doesn’t come out of the converter. It always tastes fine, but I’d like a real sausage, you know.”
“Sure,” I said. “Let me put this away and I’ll be right out.”
Each compartment in the boat had drawers built into its base. As usual, I was carrying only an extra suit for dress, the same as I’d have done if Baga and I were on foot. I set the scarf beside the suit and came back outside.
“You all going to be all right?” I asked the women.
“Of course,” said Irene, which was pretty much what I thought as well, but it seemed like the polite thing to do before we went. Besides the local servants, a dozen Midian guards were between the boat and the empty enclosure.
“I wonder what they think they’ll be able to do if another giant comes out of the Waste?” Lord Osbourn said.
“Well, they killed the shrew that came out earlier,” I said. “And anyway, now that Lady Marlene’s been released maybe there won’t be any more drawn to this place. There were sure questions I’d have liked to ask Master Hector if he hadn’t been pointlessly killed.”
We reached the gate in the city wall that Guntram and I had come out of. “You’re looking for sausage?” I said.
“To tell the truth,” said Osbourn, “what I’d really like to do is to get lace like you did, but for Marlene. Do you suppose they’d have a blue to match her eyes?”
“I haven’t looked at Marlene that carefully,” I said, wondering how easy it was going to be to work backward into Midian. “I don’t think I’m going to. And you really shouldn’t either, Osbourn. Not while we’re still on Midian.”
With the back wall of the palace on my left it really wasn’t hard to find my way back to the shop where I’d been before. The shopkeeper was delighted; apparently the nearby jeweler had told him that the silver Riders I’d paid him were nineteen parts pure rather than eleven in twelve as was standard in Midian. Osbourn settled on a rather larger scarf than I had gotten, of a blue that he found satisfactory.
When he’d finished we went back into the street. “If you’re not in too much of a hurry to get back to Marlene,” I said, “there’s a decent-looking restaurant just down the block here. Want to try that?”
In truth, Osbourn had gotten me thinking about real food which hadn’t been processed through a converter. We had a meal of sausage and beer for me and red wine for Osbourn. The sausage was a touch greasy and the lager was fixed with something more bitter than I was used to, but withal it was a wonderful change from the pureed sameness of what we would have gotten aboard the boat.
I was having a second beer while Osbourn finished his bottle of wine. A woman came over to the table exchanging occasional friendly words with waiters as she passed through. She turned a chair from a nearby table and sat between us. She said, “Greshan the goldsmith says you’re from the Commonwealth. Maybe as strangers you’d like a guide around Midian? My name’s Diane.”
I was trying to frame a polite way of sending her off, but before I could speak, Lord Osbourn sneered, “Not of your sort, trollop.”
Diane drew herself up stiffly. Her dark blue dress was of a hard fabric that wasn’t silk; a processed cotton, I supposed. It struck me that the scarf Osbourn had just bought would be a perfect complement to it.
“That’s not very friendly for a total stranger,” she said. “You folks looked like men, but maybe you’re queer for each other? Is that it?”
“I won’t bandy words with your like!” Lord Osbourn replied, bandying words pointlessly.
The woman was already standing up. I laid a hand on Osbourn’s shoulder to keep him seated. “I’m sorry, Diane, we’ve had a long voyage and we’re very tired.” I laid a polished brass Fiver on the table and said, “Have a drink on us. Lord Osbourn, let’s get back to the ladies. They’ll be worried.”
We went out into the street with no further incidents. Lord Osbourn growled, “She honestly expected me to be interested in her!”
“She wasn’t bad looking,” I said, trying to keep things calm. I was surprised that Osbourn, usually even tempered, had gotten abusively angry. Maybe it was the suggestion that he and I were lovers, though he’d been pretty hostile to her from the first.
“Marlene’s a lot prettier,” Osbourn said. “And she’s got brains besides.”
We reached the gate in the wall again. “We don’t know anything important about Diane,” I said. “Except that Count Stokes doesn’t think they’re married.”
Guntram was outside with the women when we arrived at the boat. They greeted us warmly and for a moment I was afraid Lady Marlene was going to throw her arms around Osbourn. I’d have intervened if that happened, and though I didn’t have to, I sure wasn’t looking forward to the interview with Count Stokes when Marlene announced her decision.
* * *
In the morning, I took Sam out on the Road. We had nowhere to go, but it gets old sitting in the boat and Sam needed a jaunt as badly as I did.
I didn’t wake Lord Osbourn as he liked to sleep later than I did, and I knew he’d been awake chatting with Lady Marlene until the small hours of the morning. It wasn’t my place to object, but I’d surely rather they displayed more decorum while we were in Count Stokes’s domains.
Christiana might have liked to go with us but I refused to take her. She was Osbourn’s dog and she shouldn’t get into the habit of working with somebody else. A warrior and his dog had to have a perfect bond or the result in a fight was likely to be fatal.
We went up the Road to the next landingplace. I would generally have checked about the neighborhood with the Clerk of Here before I went off on a patrol, but because I was going by boat this time I hadn’t bothered to. I suspected that they were administered by Midian.
I didn’t go into the node I’d reached, just turned around and went back to Midian. Visiting unfamiliar nodes was still exciting to me after being raised on Beune, which was a long way from places that anybody would want to be, but right at the moment my attention was on the political situation if Lady Marlene decided not to go through with her marriage with the Count. We’d wait out the week, but the decision was pretty obvious already.
I wondered what would have happened if Lord Osbourn hadn’t come along. The giant coming out of the Waste just then had been chance, but even without that striking illustration of the difference between Osbourn and the Count my companion would have ranked pretty high. He was handsome, smart and the same apparent age as Lady Marlene b
ecause the years in Master Hector’s prison hadn’t weighed on Marlene the same way they had on those outside. Like Count Stokes.
The situation might cause problems for the Leader. I didn’t doubt that Jon would back me, but he might wish that I’d convinced Osbourn to think again about the situation. I was pretty sure Osbourn had been thinking about the lady much more frequently than that.
Sam and I returned to Midian at a more leisurely pace than we’d gone out.
The point at which the node of Midian impinged on the Road—landingplace—was much broader than most. You could have driven an oxcart onto it without brushing the Waste to either side—if you could have gotten an ox or any other herbivore onto the Road without it panicking.
Sam and I headed straight for the boat expecting to relax. To my surprise Christiana was barking furiously on the ground and Irene was coming out of the hatch shouting, “Come on, then!”
The palace servants had vanished. More to my surprise the platoon of uniformed guards had moved off also. There wasn’t anything they could really do against another giant, but as I’d said to Osbourn there were more monsters than that in the Waste.
Sam was getting excited also from Christiana’s barking. Lord Osbourn came out of the hatch, adjusting the bandolier from which his shield and weapon hung. “I’m ready!” he shouted back to Irene. Then he saw me and said, “Lord Pal! Where were you? Will you back me?”
“Yes,” I said, because that’s the right answer any time a friend asks you for help. “But what in the name of heaven is going on?”
“Stokes’s brutes have kidnapped Marlene!” Lady Irene said. “We’d gone back to the enclosure to get a rhododendron in a pot that Marlene wanted to take with her to Dun Add—she’s not staying on Midian. But when we started to come out one of the Count’s clerks came in with the soldiers and they took Marlene into the palace. I came back here and woke up Lord Osbourn. I didn’t know where you were!”
“I’m here now,” I said, keeping my voice calm and not reacting to Lady Irene’s obvious anger at me for not having checked in with her before I got some exercise. To Osbourn I said, “Have you talked to anybody yet?”
“I just woke up,” Lord Osbourn said. “I guess we have to, don’t we? I’m so angry that I’d probably say the wrong thing if I tried, so you’d better do the talking, Pal.”
“The time for talking was before they stole off a girl they knew was under our protection,” I said. “I’ll lead, sure, but I don’t think we’re going to talk very much.”
I nodded to the main gate of the palace no longer a real fortress, thank goodness. I took out my equipment.
“Come on, Sam,” I said as I switched my weapon on and went up a plane on which the normal aspects of Here and humans without Ancient hardware were ghostly shadows. “We’re going calling on the neighbors.”
Lord Osbourn took my left side, five feet distant so that we wouldn’t get in one another’s way, as we headed for the entrance. By the time we were halfway there, a fellow in a flowing robe stepped out flanked by at least fifteen of Lord Stokes’s guards. They were all armed, and they switched on as we approached. They didn’t have dogs, though, which would make them much less agile than me and Osbourn in a fight.
The fellow in the robe was speaking but he wasn’t shouting loudly enough for me to understand him with my weapon on. I switched off and called, “We have come for Lady Marlene, who is under my protection. Will you surrender her without violence?”
The clerk—that was what Irene had called him and it seemed likely enough—shouted back, “Count Stokes will not turn over his wife to foreign adventurers! Go away or it will be worse for you!”
He must have given a signal to the guards, because the blue-uniformed squad stepped forward in a wobbly line. I was glad now that Tsetzas had already been killed. I’d liked and respected him, the more so after his suicidal rush at the giant. He’d have done the same thing with me—and would have died just as surely: liking the man wouldn’t have prevented me from doing my duty to get Lady Marlene back.
I had the lead in this, partly because I was afraid that Osbourn might have hesitation about what we were doing. I didn’t. I’d committed and that was it.
The second man from my right in the line was slightly ahead of the guards to either side of him. As I suspected, he paused to look to his side when he realized he was getting ahead. I didn’t need his momentary inattention to take him but I used it, lunging forward to thrust past the angle of his shield and stab him through the top of his chest. He toppled backward, drawing the attention of the guy on his right he’d been looking at.
I thrust through the center of that man’s shield. I started to say “without art” but in fact I was making the point of how much better my weapon was than the shields of most of these guards. I was willing to kill all the Count’s men, but I’d rather frighten them into running away.
Sam and I went through the gap in the line. I almost collided with the clerk, screaming in terror and stumbling headlong as he tried to get away. Sam and I turned. If the sprawled clerk had been armed, I’d have killed him; but as it was, even behind me he was no threat.
I took a guard through the hip from behind. He toppled, and Osbourn, coming through the line, hacked down the man beside him.
Osborn and I stood together with the surviving guards facing us in a clump, none of them between us and the gateway. Osbourn and I couldn’t communicate with our weapons on but he knew to back me as I charged the guards. My purpose was to do as much damage as possible to prevent them from following us into the palace.
One guard met me with a thrust which I took on my shield. Before he could withdraw his arm I’d severed it and his weapon thumped to the ground. Three rushed together from my left. They were getting in their own way from the beginning, but the confusion got worse after Osbourn thrust the outside man through the knee and he sprawled in front of his fellows. I stabbed quickly.
Lord Osbourn and I were working as a team; without coordination, numbers are a handicap.
There were still five or six guards upright, but they were the men who’d hung back earlier in the fighting. I was breathing hard and really wanted this business to be over. I swung toward the guards, advancing my shield. Osbourn was beside me.
One man bolted; then they all scattered back across landingplace. I switched off and looked around. My equipment was only vaguely warm from the work it had done. There was a nice breeze but the air in the gateway was thick with the stench of blood and the wastes men had voided as they died. The sharpness of ozone cut through other smells.
I turned to the clerk and said, “Lead us to Lady Marlene!”
“I’m not sure!” the clerk said. “I didn’t see her after she went inside!”
Lord Osbourn switched his weapon back on and took a step toward the clerk. The clerk shouted, “I’ll see!” and scrambled through the palace gateway. Lord Osbourn may not have been able to understand the words, but he wasn’t hot tempered and I wasn’t worried that he was going to cut the civilian down. I ran along with them. There was a chance that an archer was going to pot me since my equipment was off, but I decided being able to see and hear normally was worth the risk.
The clerk shouted to a servant lurking in an alcove half the length of the room away. I thought for a moment that fellow wasn’t going to respond but as I started toward him he pointed toward the back of the room where I knew the door to Master Beddoes’s quarters was.
The pair of guards were gone but Count Stokes himself stepped into the inner doorway. He carried a shield and weapon of excellent quality. “Count Stokes!” I cried. “We’ve come for Lady Marlene. If you hand her over we’ll go away and not trouble you further. You won’t be harmed.”
“You’re bandits and I can’t trust you!” Stokes said. “You’re just the sort of bride stealers as Master Hector was. I’ll protect Lady Marlene from you or die trying!”
This was awkward. I didn’t see any way to rescue Marlene that didn’t invo
lve going through Stokes, and the incident even if told with an attempt at neutrality was going to look like a particularly brutal piece of bride theft. I hadn’t expected the Count to show so much backbone.
Lord Osbourn had also switched off his equipment. He looked around. The clerk was close behind us. Osbourn pointed to him and said, “You! Servant! You’re my witness!”
“I am Treasurer Keames,” the clerk said. “What am I witnessing?”
Osbourn turned to Stokes. “Your lordship!” he shouted. “I challenge you to fight me man to man for Lady Marlene! Lord Pal—” he turned to me “—swear on your honor as a Champion that you will abide by this arrangement—and not interfere with the duel or with Count Stokes if he defeats me.”
Lord Osbourn couldn’t commit me—and he knew that—but under the circumstances I was willing to be bound. “I swear!” I said. “If Count Stokes defeats you, I go back to Dun Add and Lady Marlene remains here with her husband!”
“You can’t do that!” Lady Irene cried. “You can’t turn Marlene over to that old brute!”
“Lady Irene,” I said, “I don’t take orders from you. I will support the decision of my friend and colleague.”
Irene’s interference underlined her basic overestimate of her own importance, but it was the perfect goad to bring Stokes to an irrevocable decision. “I accept your terms, Lord Pal!” he said and switched on his shield and weapon. He attacked Osbourn at once.
Those were Osbourn’s terms, not mine. I was only willing to accept them because I knew that the Count didn’t have a prayer of winning a duel with Lord Osbourn. Their equipment was comparable, but Osbourn had Champion’s training and recent practice. Count Stokes had arrogance and probably an inflated sense of his own skill.
He struck an overhead blow which would probably have crashed through the shield of most opponents to be met this far from Dun Add. Osbourn’s weapon guided the stroke into the floor where it crackled and burned though the marble slabs. Stokes really did have a powerful weapon, even better than I’d thought at a quick glance.