The Immortal Throne (2016)

by Stella Gemmell

  ‘There is one thing I remember about my father,’ the boy volunteered as they started to reset the table, the counters clattering against the polished wood. The two old men stared at him, waiting.

  ‘It’s just a flash of memory,’ he said in his modest way, ‘and probably means nothing. But I remember him wearing a red jacket. He wore it proudly as if for some feast day or celebration.’ He shrugged. ‘Perhaps I’m just imagining it,’ he added, ‘because I want to remember him.’

  Elija wandered over to the balustrade again to hide his expression. Let them chew on that, he thought. His story was entirely untrue. He remembered little before the Halls. He could not recall his father’s face, far less what the man wore. But it amused him to toy with these old game-players as they tried to dig out his secrets, his and Em’s, under the guise of friendship. And he remembered Broglanh telling him that his old red jacket, sleeveless, worn and faded, was a remnant from his time with the Wildcats, now all gone. Dol Salida and Sully could waste their time on a quail hunt, searching through army records for long-lost Wildcats, vainly seeking his father.

  He remembered Broglanh telling him Indaro had always worn a bright red jacket, shiny in its newness. But she must have lost it before she met Elija at Old Mountain, for he had never seen her in it.

  Elija leaned over the balcony, his spirits high, and listened for the call of the frogs.

  Directly beneath him, motionless against the courtyard wall, was a small, dark-haired man clothed in black. Camouflaged by the dappled moon shadows of a spreading plane tree, he had been listening to the men on the balcony, although he could make little sense of their words for the City tongue was new to him.

  After a few more moments the youngster above moved away and Fin Gilshenan glided swiftly back around the courtyard. He slid in through a small window then stealthily made his way to where the two others waited with a dark lantern. The pair followed him silently. At the end of the corridor, apparently a dead-end, only a narrow, vertical black line on the wall showed where they had entered. They bent and carefully shifted the piece of wall out of place, revealing a square black hole.

  One by one they slid through the hatchway and back into the echoing darkness of the lift-shaft.

  It was nearing dawn when Dol Salida limped wearily back to his apartments. His leg pained him more than he could bear sometimes, and it was only when in deep contemplation of urquat that he forgot about it for a while. He had long since given up trying to sleep in a bed, and he would sit in his comfortable chair by the windows, flung open wide on these warm, heavy nights, and doze until it was time for his day to start.

  So he was startled, and momentarily alarmed, when he entered his dim parlour to see his accustomed chair already occupied, a candle lit.

  ‘Don’t call the guard,’ the empress ordered. ‘They will not come at your command tonight.’

  She leaned forward and peered at his face. ‘Oh, for pity’s sake, Dol Salida! I am just here to talk.’

  ‘For a moment I feared assassins,’ he said, and she watched him shrewdly in the growing light of morning.

  ‘You have no reason to fear me, counsellor,’ she told him. ‘You have been a good and faithful servant, and if I harboured suspicions of you I would confront you first.’

  He nodded, unconvinced. He pulled up another chair and sat down with a sigh he could not stifle.

  ‘What can I do for you, lady?’ he asked, trying not to sound as weary as he felt. ‘A game of urquat, perhaps?’

  ‘Is your wife content?’ she asked unexpectedly.

  Their house having been swept away in the destruction of the Feast of Summoning, Gerta and their two remaining daughters now lived in an ancient, thick-walled cottage nestled at the base of the Shield. Dol had been offered a palace, a small one, by the grateful empress, but Gerta had been unwilling to take on an army of servants. She was happy in her new home, spending the long summer tending vegetables, something she had always wanted to do. Now they were important people in the City, Dol thought with some asperity, his wife had ambitions to be a farmer. He usually stayed in his palace apartments now, the journey down the Shield being a torture to his old joints.

  ‘She is, thank you,’ he affirmed briefly, wanting Archange to get to the reason for this clandestine visit. They met every day, after all, to discuss matters of state. Secret dealings meant darker deeds afoot. He was curious, and a little uneasy.

  ‘Has Emly been found?’ he added, wondering if that was the reason for her visit.

  The old woman sniffed. ‘No, but she will be. She is with the Khan army, of that I am certain.’

  Dol did not question her information, but he thought it unlikely. He said nothing.

  ‘You are sceptical?’ she asked.

  ‘Hmm. Broglanh would not take the risk of being recognized. He may be a traitor but he is not a fool.’

  ‘He has always served in infantry regiments. If he joined the cavalry no one would know him. He could stay away from senior officers who might.’

  ‘And the girl?’

  ‘It is easy to lose a spare girl in an army.’

  Are you guessing, he wanted to ask her, or do you have confirmation of this? His own agents had been despatched to infiltrate the army but had come up with nothing.

  ‘And the brother?’ They were also searching for Broglanh’s adoptive brother Chancey, who had disappeared at about the same time.

  She shook her head.

  There was silence between them for a while, not uncomfortable, then the empress said, ‘You were playing urquat this night? With Elija?’ He was amused by the way she pretended uncertainty, for she surely knew every detail of his day.

  ‘The boy is not saying all he knows,’ he told her.

  ‘I know that,’ she snapped. ‘I was hoping you could squeeze more answers from him. I’m loath to have him interrogated. He’s frail, and I don’t want the girl, when she returns, to find her brother dead.’

  Why do you care? he wondered again. Torture the boy for information. Drag the girl back with a rope round her neck. The empress had never been sentimental with anyone else. Why treat these youngsters with rabbit-skin gloves?

  ‘I have a need for new information,’ she said.

  At last, he thought.

  ‘Rubin Kerr Guillaume.’

  Dol thought hard. His files had been destroyed with the Red Palace, but he had an excellent memory.

  ‘Son of Reeve, of course. Brother to Indaro – the gods curse her name,’ he added formally. ‘At sixteen he ran away from the Salient to escape serving in the army. Said to have fled to the Halls. Then he turned up working for Marcellus. Believed killed on the Day of Summoning.’

  ‘But, in fact, still alive,’ she told him.

  He bowed his head, conceding her greater knowledge. The name Guillaume had scarcely bothered him during his many years as spymaster at the Red Palace. The old man Reeve was a dried husk, a dead-end. The two children were both deserters, perhaps both traitors.

  ‘He worked for Marcellus,’ she prompted.

  He searched through his memory, summoning up his years spent studying the First Lord. He nodded as the fragments coalesced. ‘Rubin served Marcellus confidentially in the last years of the Red Palace,’ he concluded. ‘Within palace and City and without. They were close. I believe Marcellus confided in him, trusted him in a way he could not trust many in his inner circle. And the boy – he’s younger than Indaro – spent time in Odrysia on Marcellus’ behalf. He spoke, speaks, the tongue fluently. Rumour at the time had it that he was instrumental in the fall of the Winter Palace.’

  ‘A hero, then?’

  Dol shrugged. ‘A spy, certainly. He had no friends, apart from Marcellus, if you could call that a friendship. He probably trusts no one. It is a drawback of that line of work. He will have many acquaintances though.’ He concluded, ‘He is highly intelligent and, it seems, a survivor.’

  ‘Find him for me.’

  ‘May I ask why?’

  The
empress shifted a little in her seat, and it occurred to him that, like him, she was in pain. For a moment he wondered why two old folk such as they were discussing dark deeds at dawn.

  ‘I have learned,’ she said, ‘that shortly before the Day of Summoning Rubin Guillaume and a former Warhound named Valla had an audience with Marcellus at the palace, in the Black Room. I want to know what was said.’

  ‘Was anyone else present?’

  ‘No. Marcellus’ aides were dismissed. Rubin and the woman both disappeared afterwards, believed dead in the Red Palace. But recently news reached me that Rubin has been seen. He is apparently working his way round the City’s hospitals from south to north, searching for the Warhound.’

  ‘She is injured?’ Dol knew most of the Warhounds had been slaughtered in the Hall of Emperors.

  ‘Crippled. She carries one arm strapped to her chest. But the boy believes, perhaps, that she can be found at a hospital because she tended the wounded during the campaign at Needlewoman’s Notch.’

  ‘You want her too?’

  ‘Of course. My agents are seeking them both in the hospitals, but if your own agents are also on the hunt, their capture will no doubt come more swiftly.’

  They sat for a while as light grew around them. Dol’s belly rumbled and his thoughts went to breaking his fast, but he knew no servant would dare enter the room while the empress was there.

  ‘What news of the Khan army?’ he asked her at last.

  ‘A messenger arrived last night. They will be at the Vorago by now. Marcus hopes to pacify Petrus and instal Hayden as leader by winter.’

  Dol raised an eyebrow. ‘I doubt it will be that easy,’ he said, knowing Archange was happy to have the head of the Khan Family – and most popular soldier in the City’s armies – far away. Archange had the backing of the armies and at the moment Marcus supported her. What would happen if he withdrew that support only the gods knew. Dol’s fortunes were now tied inextricably with those of the empress, for good or bad, and he hoped her imperium would be long and benevolent, for when she fell then so would he, and it was a long way to fall.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  THE OLD MAN tried to sit up in his bed, his gaze fixed on something only he could see. He could no longer speak and his eyes passed over Rubin in their anxious search as if he could not see either. He had taken a little water earlier and his eyes had met Rubin’s but there was no intelligence in them, just the simple blue gaze of a baby animal given something which makes it content. Now he turned his head away when water was offered, as if he could see only one path ahead of him and he knew he had to reach the hard end of it as soon as possible.

  Rubin looked around him. This hospital, set up by the empress in alliance with Hayden Weaver’s forces, was in the southwest of the City and had initially served Blues wounded in the invasion. First a small tent town, it had suffered attacks by City folk ignorant of the alliance who saw only enemies who had killed their loved ones. Dozens of citizens found guilty of attacking the hospitals, against Archange’s clear orders, were put to death. The tents had in time been replaced by stout wooden huts and now, in high summer, most of the injured Blues had either died or recovered, and the hospital served sick and dying civilians such as this old man.

  No one knew his name. He had been dragged here by soldiers who found him helpless in a street in Otaro. Otaro, the richest part of the City, had been hardly touched by the flood and invasion, and its citizens had no wish to see sick old men littering their streets. So he had been brought to this place where the helpless dying were fed and watered until they could no longer indicate any such need.

  Rubin had come to the hospital in his continuing search for Valla and he had been sitting at the man’s bedside all morning, though he didn’t really know why.

  When, in the early winter, he had escaped the ruins of the Red Palace with Fiorentina and the three refugees from the Halls, he had been close to despair. His lord had departed and he was in a city ruined by flood and invaded by the enemy, filled with bedraggled survivors who had lost homes and loved ones. The young woman they had rescued, whose name was Alafair, was in pain from her broken wrist, so he risked seeking sanctuary at a temple of Asklepios. The head of the temple allowed Rubin to leave the children in his care and a soldier set Alafair’s wrist. After a day or two, when the wrist had started to knit, the three adults set off for the Shield of Freedom. It had taken the better part of a week to reach the mountain and when they got there they were barred from entering its boundaries by twitchy, zealous guards. For the first time since Rubin had met her Fiorentina had wielded her rank to convince the captain of the guard not to turn them away. At last an officer came down who recognized Rafael Vincerus’ wife, and then they became guests of Marcus Rae Khan and his sister Giulia.

  The Shield had been a strange place after the fall of the City. It seemed to Rubin that it would become the last refuge for the Families, barred and barricaded, defending itself against the unleashed violence of the invading army. Rubin had expected to be fighting in corridors, manning barricades, perhaps tending the wounded. In fact, none of these things happened, and for the first time in years he found himself getting used to feeling safe and then, surprisingly, bored.

  When it became clear – initially in gossip among servants and soldiery then more formally as the City adjusted to its new status – that Archange Vincerus was now empress – as Fiorentina had predicted – Rubin was not a little worried. He remembered Marcellus’ last words to him, burned into his brain in letters of fire: Do not trust Archange. Do not trust her, do not trust her words or her actions.

  And so it was a mixture of boredom and prudence which led him to forsake the comfortable life on the Shield and go back down into the turbulent City. He knew it would come to the empress’s attention, in due course, that a scion of the Guillaumes was staying in the Khan Palace and he wanted to be away before that happened. He had crossed the City and headed for the Salient and home. There was much to ask his father and much to tell him, most importantly that his sister Indaro was alive on the Day of Summoning. He had been disappointed not to see her in the aftermath but assumed she was back with her company.

  Twenty days after he left the Shield he had arrived at the foot of the cliff steps he’d descended all those years before. He ruefully remembered the boy he had been, barely sixteen, armed only with a knife and overwhelming self-belief. He wondered, as he had so often, if his father would greet him as the prodigal son or a cowardly deserter. He was prepared for either, for he felt like both.

  He had climbed the steep stair with difficulty, marvelling that he had once descended it under moonlight. He smiled to himself when he managed to evade the guards for a second time, then became angered that they were so incompetent – a reaction that would have been alien to his sixteen-year-old self.

  It was midday and the winter sun was shining weakly when he arrived back at his father’s house. His heart lifted to see its soft grey stone. There was no one in sight and he strolled up the carriageway, then stopped, shocked by the changes. The lawns, once well clipped, had become meadows, grasses waving in the cold breeze. The garden beds had run rampant, and the flowers had succumbed to the attack of brambles and ivies. The house looked much the same, but no smoke arose from the many chimneys and the shutters were all tight closed. He realized then that he had evaded the guards because there were no guards.

  A figure appeared round the corner of the house, a woman bundled up against the chill breeze off the sea. She hurried over to him and he saw it was Dorcas, once his mother’s maid and his friend when he was small. He realized now she was hardly older than he was, though her face was careworn, her clothes ragged.

  ‘Rubin?’ she asked, her eyes wide.

  ‘Dorcas. Where is my father?’

  ‘Gone, Rubin … sir. Gone away.’

  A cold hand gripped his heart. ‘Dead?’

  ‘No, I mean, I don’t know.’

  She was frightened by him, he realized. H
e was a grown man and must look far different to her now. He softened his voice.

  ‘Did my father die or did he leave here?’

  ‘He left, sir.’

  ‘When? After the fall of the Red Palace?’

  She looked at him, baffled. She didn’t know what he was talking about.

  ‘After the Day of Summoning?’

  She cast her eyes up, calculating. ‘Yes, not long after.’

  He led her to an old stone bench in the lee of a flint wall, away from the wind. ‘What happened?’ he asked.

  ‘A man came to see him one day,’ she told him. ‘He waited at the gates but the lord would not see him. The man waited and waited, through all the snow and ice. We thought he was mad. And then the lord said he could come in. They were in his study, talking all night, the two of them. Then in the morning the visitor left. We expected the lord to come out but he never did. In the end Simion ordered the men to break down the study door but there was no one there.’

  ‘My father was gone, but he told no one he was going?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Who was this visitor? Simion will know.’ Simion was the captain of the guard.

  ‘All the guards have gone, and most of the servants too. We keep the house shut up tight for fear of reivers.’

  ‘Reivers? Here?’

  She blinked rapidly and he saw she was on the brink of tears. ‘It’s been terrible these past years, sir. They say the emperor’s men turfed the reivers out of their home under the Salient cliffs,’ she waved her hand seaward, ‘so they’ve been marauding all along the coast. Lots of decent folk killed or worse. Homes burned. Livestock slaughtered. The lord, your father, strengthened the doors and windows and doubled the guard.’

  They both sat thinking their separate thoughts.

  ‘The emperor’s men have been here asking for the lord,’ Dorcas offered. ‘Then they went away again.’