by Leo Carew
“Vigtyr?” Roper called. “Are you inside?”
“What is it?” bellowed a voice in return. “I am busy!”
“It is Lord Roper,” said he, curtly.
There was a long pause. “Lord Roper,” came Vigtyr’s voice, abruptly civil. “How may I serve you?”
“You may start by addressing me to my face, rather than through the walls of your tent. I was hoping I might make use of it for an interrogation.” To Roper’s surprise, he heard whispered words exchanged inside.
“Of course, lord,” Vigtyr replied, eventually. “My great apologies. If I might have a moment? I am not… presentable.”
“Whenever you’re ready,” said Roper.
When, after some minutes, the stitches that held the mouth of the tent together were unfastened, Vigtyr appeared with a rueful grin. “I am deeply sorry, lord, I was not expecting visitors.”
“That is no trouble, Lictor,” said Roper, standing aside so Vigtyr could exit. “It is gracious of you to lend us the space.”
“Given to me by your own grace, lord,” said Vigtyr, piously. He stooped through the entrance and then cast a look back inside. And a woman walked out after him. She was small and stocky, with a pointed chin and prominent cheekbones. Most remarkable about her appearance however was the expression she wore. Open appraisal of Roper, sweeping his person from head to toe, and an evident disdain at what she saw.
Roper stared back. He had heard that Vigtyr was courting a new wife and here was the proof. Roper had had two of the lictor’s previous wives pointed out to him by Keturah, and had to agree that this woman was nothing like them. They had been slender and delicate, with a superficial, and to Roper’s eye, slightly immature, beauty. This woman looked rough and energetic, and even without speaking, gave off an aura of such boldness that Roper found it vaguely impertinent.
“My lord,” said Vigtyr, solemnly. “This is Adras, who is a companion of mine.”
“Pleased to meet you, Lord Roper,” Adras added, with more of a nod than a bow.
Roper looked up at Vigtyr. “Lictor. It is good of you to lend us this space, so we shall overlook this. However, to bring female company into your tent like this is a gross misuse of privilege. You are an elite officer. This falls well short of my expectations.”
Vigtyr bowed his head. “I apologise, my lord. You are right and it shall certainly not happen again.”
“See that it doesn’t.”
Vigtyr bowed and the reprimand persuaded Adras to offer something close to one in turn. They left Roper and his captive to the space, Roper’s eyes following as they departed. Neither one had stolen so much as a glance at Bellamus. Still frowning, Roper gestured the spymaster in and followed him into the gloom.
Roper’s first impression was of startling regularity. Two thick cloaks, on which Vigtyr evidently slept, lined one side like a black moat without a single crease. On the other side, Vigtyr’s armour and weapons had been laid out with minute accuracy, as though dressing an invisible corpse. In a canvas sack at the head of this equipment seemed to be Vigtyr’s food. Roper could tell from the way the sack was sitting that everything within was piled to similar extremes of order, and it even seemed that Vigtyr has smoothed and stretched out the sack to eliminate creases in its surface.
“Extraordinary,” said Roper, finding the space so methodical it was violent. Had the grass beneath his feet been swept too? Surely that was just a quirk of how the tent had been erected, but it did appear to have been flattened to create a smooth carpet of dark and shining green.
Roper gestured and Bellamus turned, allowing the Black Lord to untie his hands. The bindings were exceptionally snug and it took Roper a long time to wriggle the rawhide bands free. His hands released, Bellamus gave a quiet moan and dropped heavily to his knees, body wrapped around his white digits as they filled with blood and pain. Roper carried a bag over one shoulder and dropped it between them. “There are two ways we can proceed,” he told the balled figure. “The first will be comfortable enough for you. The second will not. Either way, you will tell us everything we need to know. Which would you prefer?”
Bellamus was silent a while, face pressed into the grass. “The first,” he murmured.
Roper nodded, reaching into the bag. Bellamus looked up rather suddenly, backing away on hands and heels, but when Roper’s hand reappeared it was holding a white wooden queen: the chess piece he had taken from the Cobweb. He hefted it, noting that the balance was skewed too far to the base and wondering again what modification it possessed. He looked long at Bellamus, but pulled out the chessboard and laid the piece carefully upon it without saying another word. Silently, he assembled the two sides.
“We are to play?” asked Bellamus suspiciously.
“We will play, and talk,” said Roper.
“May I ask a question, then?”
“The questions will be mine,” said Roper.
“I am sure. But how did you find me? I thought I had covered my tracks well.”
Roper would not indulge Bellamus, but in this case, he did not know the answer anyway. Jokul had come to him, saying he knew where Bellamus was but that the Kryptea did not have enough men to extract him. “How do you know this?” Roper had asked, warily.
“If I were you, Lord Roper,” had come the reply, “I would not waste this time quizzing me. We know where he is at this instant, but as soon as he has word of that, and he will, given how riddled our army is with his spies, he will be gone. Take him now.”
Roper had permitted himself one final question. “How many men will I need?”
The pieces were set, their two armies bristling across the battlefield once more.
“Before we play,” he said, “there was something you feared I knew earlier, as you were tied to that post. Remember your time in our captivity can go one of two ways. So what was it?”
Bellamus paused, looking down at the board. “I feared you knew that Garrett has taken command of the Hermit-Crabs, and would wish to hear where they are. I do not know, I am afraid.”
Roper did not believe him, but neither did he think that he would turn Bellamus through violence. His judged this was not a man who could be bullied, and he merely gestured at the board. “Your turn first.”
The spymaster began by moving with an entire fist clamped around each piece as dexterity returned to his fingers. Roper wondered whether he was trying to make his moves appear clumsier than they were, for he was certainly nimbler in mind than digit. He began by laying two traps for Roper in quick succession, inviting him to attack and leave his king defenceless. Roper kept his face blank, pretending that he had not noticed, and laying a counter of his own.
This did not feel like a game. On a real battlefield with real soldiers, Roper had shaded their contest only because fate had intervened: an extraordinary lightning bolt, that now marbled every swirl of Roper’s brain. The glare of it. The crack, which had been beyond the capacity of his ears so they had simply rung in protest. That violent thrill which had run through him. If Bellamus defeated him on this more controlled battlefield, it seemed to Roper he would have the mental advantage next time they met with real soldiers.
If we ever meet on the field again, he reminded himself. Which they surely would not. Bellamus was in his custody now and did not have the influence to command a Suthern army in any case.
But Roper was distracted, mind churning as to how he might bring Bellamus to their side.
“You must hate us with an unusual intensity, Master Bellamus,” he said carefully, eyes set on the board as though considering his next move.
Bellamus’s head jerked up. “Hate you?”
“Of all our enemies, you are our most dedicated and resourceful. And yet the operation at your spy-hub was a small one. It must take unusual motivation to persist and cause such damage when confronted with so many obstacles.”
“Oh.” Bellamus looked down again, smiling wryly. “No. No, I don’t hate you at all, in fact.”
Their piece
s wrestled for a few minutes more before Roper went on. “Why do you do it, then?”
Bellamus made no reply for a time. In which theatre he was considering his next move, Roper had no idea. But there had been something in his wry smile at the last question that made Roper think Bellamus knew exactly what he was trying to do. “Ambition,” he said at last.
“Is there no other way for you to satisfy your ambition?”
“For me, not really, no. You may not understand this, Lord Roper. In my world, I am one of the lowest because of my lineage. Ordinarily, there would only be so far I could rise without one of my betters putting me back down. But that does not satisfy me. Every noble in Erebos fears and despises your kind. So much that they would never seek to understand you themselves: it would make them sick in the eyes of society, and they’d be shunned. It takes an outsider, with no status to lose, to specialise in your people. And however much they’re loath to admit it, that makes me invaluable to the nobility.” He glanced at Roper. “I must admit though, I discovered that mostly by accident. When I first started to study the Anakim, it was because you fascinated me.”
“So you don’t hate us.”
“Not in the least.”
“That does make you unique,” Roper observed. “But you say you’re invaluable to the nobility, and yet, at the village we found you, you seemed to be operating alone.”
“I am invaluable,” Bellamus insisted. “But I am not immune. And the loss of our forces at Harstathur was a significant mark against me. But I hoped that in the chaos of your coming south, the king might discover once more how much he needs me, and offer a royal pardon.”
“So despite all you have done, you are still held at arm’s length from Lundenceaster.” Roper smiled. “In my country, we are treated the same from birth, regardless of parentage. And when we reach the rank of subject, we call each other ‘peer’ to show that all is equal between us.”
“I know.”
“It has been very frustrating fighting against you. If you were one of us, you’d be a senior officer. Perhaps a legate, in command of a legion. And your own people will give you none of that, because of the circumstances of your birth?”
Bellamus looked up very slowly from the board, fixing Roper with one brown eye. His face was resolved, and amused, as if to say: I know what you’re doing, Lord Roper. “Indeed.”
Roper looked back at him. “We’ll need you to help us, Bellamus. It is the only way I shall be able to justify keeping you alive.”
“What do you want from me?”
“Your full cooperation,” said Roper. “Starting by disclosing the location and extent of the Suthern forces.”
“I don’t know them,” said Bellamus, with such obvious relief that Roper believed him. “It was always a risk that I’d be captured. Everything I have done, I have done with as little knowledge as possible. Mostly I gather information on your forces and send it to Lundenceaster with suggestions of how they might use it. Little news comes back.
“Then I want you to write a message to Lundenceaster, passing them false tidings.” But Bellamus was shaking his head.
“My messages to Lundenceaster had to be encrypted with a physical cypher, which I destroyed when I saw you approach. I can no longer send or receive messages from the south.”
“I don’t believe you,” said Roper.
Bellamus shrugged. “Whether you believe me or not does not matter. I cannot do it.” There was a fraught silence, Bellamus turning back to the board first.
The game was concluding, Roper rounding up the last of Bellamus’s pieces and surrounding his king. “Checkmate,” he announced, with as much nonchalance as he could muster.
Bellamus’s good eye peered down at the board. “Damn,” he said, with such polite dismay that Roper laughed accidentally. “Again?”
“I have duties,” said Roper, though he suggested a game the next day, as they were still awaiting Tekoa’s return. They played again the following afternoon, Roper wondering whether he could use Bellamus’s ravenous ambition as a lever to turn him to their side. But though he was victorious on the board, he felt no closer to recruiting the spymaster.
He returned Bellamus to his post, and was in the act of tethering him to it when he spotted that Tekoa was back, stalking past them and glowering at the grass. “Looking particularly confrontational, Legate,” Roper observed.
Tekoa glanced at the pair of them, and then stopped abruptly. “One of the legionaries we found in your barn is dead, spymaster,” he said spikily. “Another is grievously sick. And since we visited your lair, several of my own men have developed severe lethargy and pain.” He prowled towards Bellamus, almost led by his eyes, boring into the Sutherner. “So I ask you, spy-monger. What have you done?”
27
Sickness
The nobles of Lundenceaster tended to favour litters if they wanted to travel across the city. Aramilla found them unbearably stifling and preferred to walk. While her ladies-in-waiting tried to emulate her in all things, this was too much. Their slippers were fine satin, their gowns silk, their hair piled and oiled, and all that would disintegrate within moments of contact with the filthy streets. Thus Aramilla walked at the head of a flotilla of litters, a score of royal retainers guarding every angle of her.
The cobbles heaved and bustled. Nightwater was cast down with an air of celebration, splattering knees and shins. The folk of the city (brown, Aramilla noted, always brown in hair, in garb, in shoe and in the filth on their faces) squawked and bustled like hens, carrying flour, carpets, charcoal barrows, geese. As they saw the queen and her royal guard, they hurried aside, snatching off their caps and stooping low. Or most of them did. Whores, peering from upstairs windows, called lasciviously to her, inviting her for lessons on how she might please her king. The royal couple’s lack of children was a common source of gossip and wonder, but the crude shouts only made Aramilla smile, and the whores, pleased with this royal recognition, would then cry: “God bless Her Majesty! God bless King Osbert!”
God bless King Osbert. He had not even spoken to her since their encounter in the reading room. Every time Aramilla tried to approach him in court, he had turned ostentatiously aside. An unfamiliar feeling now disturbed her: that of instability.
They reached the city walls by the barracks where Aramilla found her father. “Ah, my dear.” He took a firm grip on her arm, steering her away from the guards as each litter opened like an oyster and disgorged a shining noble. “And what word from your low-born charmer?” He sounded revolted.
Aramilla looked around, but no one seemed to have heard the earl’s words. “He’s intercepted a shipment of weapons destined for Unhierea, without which the giants will not join the fight.”
“My, hasn’t he done well?” said the earl carelessly. “We shall go and build on his success.” All around them, the barracks were expelling men, who were heading for the gate and the huge encampment assembling before Lundenceaster. Aramilla’s ladies-in-waiting climbed to the top of the wall and watched like a row of seagulls as the army to defeat the Anakim mustered. They would head north under Earl Seaton’s command, gathering knights and the fyrd (a force of armed peasants) until they were ready to meet the Black Lord on the field. His forces were growing weaker through hunger, Bellamus reported, and every day their heartsickness at being abroad would increase. All the while, the Suthern forces would get stronger. Time was with them. They might lose a few northern towns and cities, but the true objective was to keep Suthdal itself. And the longer they waited, the better their chances became.
“Have you told His Majesty about Bellamus?” asked Aramilla calmly, grey eyes on the army below.
“I? No, no… Why, are you not well regarded at present?”
“He won’t acknowledge me.”
“Your own carelessness, I’m afraid.”
Aramilla wilted at that news. The king had never been so suspicious before and she could do nothing to placate him if he would not even talk to her. She could n
ot recall ever having felt so exposed, a feeling not helped by the lack of news from Bellamus in recent days. She looked at her father. “I have not heard from Bellamus for some time now. There were messages I was expecting from him which haven’t arrived. That is unusual.”
“Dear me, out of favour with both your lovers at once,” said the earl. “Your powers are growing weak.”
The nobles on the battlements were applauding at the army massing below them, but to Aramilla it looked weak. It was many fewer than they had been able to muster the previous year and that force had been utterly routed by the Anakim.
“I must join the army,” said Earl Seaton. He smiled at Aramilla, giving her a delicate kiss for the benefit of the watchers on the battlement. “Remember who our enemy is, Daughter,” he said softly. “Remember how you’ll survive this.”
Aramilla did not stay on the wall long, feeling that she needed company for the first time that she could remember. She discovered one of her ladies departing early, and ignoring this terrible etiquette, latched onto her. “Departing so soon, Lady Cathryn?”
Cathryn, plump and dimpled, gave a sunny curtsey to the queen. “The battlements are packed, Your Majesty. There was not much to see.”
“Perhaps I will share your litter on the way back,” said Aramilla, graciously.
Lady Cathryn waved a hand informally at the plush interior. “As you wish, Majesty.”
I am weak indeed, she thought. For the first time in her life, she had no powerful allies. The king’s displeasure weakened her own status and she became aware of the feeling of aloneness, new and leaching. She smiled at Cathryn with true gratitude and stepped into the litter.
“Me?” asked Bellamus, incredulous beneath Tekoa’s glare. “What could I have done? It sounds as though your men have fallen ill, sir.” But the spymaster’s heart was thumping.