The Best of Men - an epic fantasy (Song of Ages Book 1)
Page 10
‘Of course all that money was spent for the one purpose only: to get Iskandar into town and to his trysts without anyone getting to hear of it. The house at the end of the tunnel wasn’t an inn in those days, more like a close house for the King’s agents and he reckoned they’d be the last people to betray him.’
Seama snorted at that. ‘I don’t suppose they had anyone coming in to do the cooking and the laundry then?’
‘Aye, you see the flaw, Seama. Of course the servants were sworn to secrecy too but it takes just the one. However, things seemed to move along in the King’s favour for a few years at least and there’s four or five dalliances to keep him amused. That three of these girls disappeared unexpectedly should have given him a warning but mebbee he wasn’t too worried what was happening to them if only he was allowed to continue.
‘Naturally enough Layala had gotten to know all about it. I guess the whole nation was waiting for her to do as she’d threatened, and common rumour about the missing girls was rife. Question was, did she pay these lassies off and send them away, or did something much nastier happen to them? No one knew but, as long as naught was said, the King felt free to carry on his career.
‘The end of it came when the latest young lass got ideas above her station. Some people said she was the image of the Queen in the first days of their marriage, some said she made herself up that way quite deliberately. Whatever the case, the King fast became besotted with the wee hussy, couldn’t deny her a thing and couldn’t countenance the thought of the Queen doing something against her. Eventually the girl was daft enough to go that one step too far: she wanted the King to divorce his wife and marry her instead.
‘I guess he havered and hawed at first. Even if the Queen had been your average sort of woman, it was a drastic step to think o’ taking. Fact is she wasn’t anything like average and not at all normal. But the young lass kept up her campaign, and our Iskandar got to dreaming of a new wife, and finally the lure of the girl proved just too much. Almost as if she’d put a glamour on him hersel’ the King found he had no will left to resist. One evening he sends his girl a message saying he’s made a decision, and if only she’d wait for him he’d come along later that night to give her the news.
‘Back in the Palace Iskandar has dinner with his wife, completes his evening’s duties and then trots off to his bed in the normal way. I guess he was in a graether of anticipation waiting for the servants to finish their tasks and go off to their rooms, but soon as he may, away he goes, down to the cellars, quick through his contraption, and then off along the Old Dog’s Back Passage, where we are now.
‘Sometime after midnight the Captain of the King’s Guard and twenty o’ his men, warned by an anonymous message that the King was in danger and where he might be, turn up at the close house ready to fight a battle if need be. But all they find, just come through the doorway out onto the street, is Queen Layala, hair draggled, clothes covered in blood and in a terrible state of anguish, screaming and sobbing.
‘“Where is the King?” the Captain demands and lays hands upon the woman to shake the truth out of her. “What have you done?”
‘Well the Queen wasn’t having any o’that. With the strength o’ a man she threw him off and stood there, straight and still, defying them all. And her deadly gaze fell upon them one by one, as if she wanted to be sure they would all mark what she said.
‘‘‘What have I done, you ask,” says she, “Nothing but love him. Nothing but try to give him the prize ever he sought. He was my husband, King of Pars – the reason for my life. And you, his loyal subjects, you call him the Old Dog and you laugh at his foolish ways and revel in my misery. Well no more! If you want the Old Dog you will find him within. Do not expect too much. I have given him all I could and yet it was never enough. Never enough. And now it is over.”
‘In rush the guards, in rushes the Captain, all to find the King seated at a table, head dipped to examine whatever lay on the board before him. But they were too late. His life-blood, in a pool all around him, poured from a dozen wounds in his chest and his neck. On the table lay a leathern bag with the contents all spilling out: a pigs liver, an emptied flask, sticky to the touch and the severed hand of a young woman. You can imagine the horror of the Captain but he was a strong man and not to be deflected from his duty. He was quick to understand that the Queen had been practising the blackest of all arts. She’d destroyed the girl and the King was mortally wounded. Ignoring the blood he came in close to see if anything could be done. “My King,” he begged, “What crime is here?” And sure enough the King was not dead but clinging on to his ruined life as though there was something more he had left to do. There was barely a twitch of the hand to beckon but the Captain understood and he stooped to listen for the King seemed to have something to say before the end. With his one, final, ragged breath, Iskandar, King of Pars, made certain his wicked wife would be condemned by all and reviled throughout history. “She promised me love and life,” he said, “she gave me only blood.”
‘The story goes that at her trial Layala cursed the court for its blindness. The King’s brother, Rúhandar, she said, was at the root of the all the rumours that dogged their marriage and made a mockery of the truth; she would gladly face even the ugliest death, she said, rather than drag out her days among such fools and villains. They hung her in the market place and the people brought wood and oil and rosemary and burned her corpse to drive out the evil she had brought. Rúhandar took the throne, as was his right, and set a law that never after, for shame or otherwise, could a King of Pars be named for Iskandar. It is a fact also, with or without a law, that never after did a king of Pars even think to marry a Masachee.
‘Now that, my friend, is the story o’the King’s Back Passage.’
‘And the reason for the pub’s name, to boot.’
‘Aye, nice to get it all sorted isn’t it?’
‘Quite a horrible tale really. You wonder what was the truth behind it.’
‘Do ye? Seems pretty straightforward te me.’
‘Nothing to do with men and women and witchcraft, if that’s what it was, could possibly be straightforward. And nothing in history ever happened exactly as we remember it. Misremembered detail, unreliable witness, the problem of interpretation: history is very much what we make it.’
‘Ye’re no fun.’
‘Maybe. Contraption?’
‘Ha! Thought you’d come back to it. Weel, if we can get going again – and oddly enough I do feel a little better after all that – we should come to the contraption in ten minutes or so. Let’s say it’ll be a surprise fer ye. Meanwhile, now I’ve done with my story-telling, I think it’s your turn. So what’s the news on this spell and what it’s doing to the castle? Feel no pressure but just make sure ye tell me everything, then mebbee I won’t sound so stupet when Mador starts quizzing me.’
Seama’s tale was much less dramatic. Someone had set a spell of dissolution upon the castle. He explained as they forged ahead.
‘Do you remember how to cast a blight?’
‘Am I supposed to?’
‘Standard teaching for the fifth years – I’m sure you’ll have had it when you were a student. Perhaps you’ll remember being taken to the beach and making up sandcastles?’
‘Sandcastles?’ Tregar, walking ahead of Seama said nothing for a few moments but his shoulders lifted into a shrug. ‘I can remember building sandcastles in my younger years but I don’t remember… Ah, now wait a minute. This’ll be the one where you’re to build the castle and then knock it down without touching it, that right?’
‘Well nearly. The students who fail the test are the ones who give it the push. Other more subtle students fill the castle with water and pull at a few grains here and there. They fail too. A pass is given only to the students who understand that all things eventually decay, decompose, come apart, and they have to und
erstand why.’
Tregar grunted in derision. ‘Well, it’s easy isn’t it? Erosion, the weight of the earth, the work of the elements.’
‘You pass. Nearly. It is a matter of other attractions. The castle is put in place by our own force, using the weak cement of sand in water. Our will, we could say, is what makes and holds the castle together for a period of time. But other forces will assert themselves. Left to itself, through the drying power of the sun, the pull of the earth, the scouring of the wind, the weight of the tide, our sandcastle is doomed before the day is out. Of course everything we build, everything we create is subject to the same problem: other forces continue on their set course just as we continue on ours.’
‘So,’ said Tregar happily, ‘I’m right then. In effect what you’re saying is it’s all to do with external forces. In that case what’s so wrong with giving it the push?’
‘Sorry, you fail. A two year old can knock down a sandcastle. But what if you could influence the action of other forces and you could do that without the use of kinetics? What if your will could cause all of the forces of decay to increase their natural activity, to work faster together? And that you could localize the effect? A word of dissolution supports the forces of decay, lends them greater power, enables them and drives them into greater action.’
‘All sounds a bit pointless, Seama, direct action’s the way with me. You know, I do remember now. It took me so long to figure out what the teachers were talking about that my sandcastle dried out and fell apart anyway. I’m not sure I got any further. But drying out now, that’s one of the processes ye say?’
Seama groaned. ‘Yes it is, but you’re supposed to bring the thing down in four minutes not four hours.’
‘Oh well. It’s not the only thing I failed at. But anyway, the key point you’re trying to get into my noddle is that someone has set a word of dissolution upon Castle Ayer.’
‘Exactly.’
‘Well,’ Tregar said, the weight of his thought bringing him to a halt, ‘It occurs to me that Ayer’s a good bit bigger than a sandcastle.’ He turned to face Seama. ‘Wouldn’t it take a lot of power to bring it down – a hell of a lot?’
Seama mirrored Tregar’s frown. He didn’t much like the notion.
‘Yes. Yes it would,’ he agreed. ‘Obvious really.’ He pushed past his companion and strode on with a renewed urgency. ‘I couldn’t do it,’ he said, ‘I might manage a wall but not a house. To bring down a castle, especially this castle, it should be impossible; but trust me Tregar, that’s what’s happening.’
Tregar had to trot to keep up.
‘So how are they doing it then? How could anyone be more powerful than you are? Oh right, right. I see: they’re borrowing the power.’
‘That’s what I think. And if they are borrowing power then I doubt the donor is anything benign.’
‘Dangerous business, Seama, messing with dark powers. You’d have to be mad to try it, or desperate.’
‘Or supremely confident.’
‘Any idea who?’
‘None at all. Come on, let’s get the journey done. The key thing is to stop the spell. We can worry later about who set it.’
‘But I thought… Oh!’
Tregar’s note of surprise echoed oddly. Seama realized the big Spurladian had stopped again, but not it seemed because he was weary. The light of the lanterns cast deep furrows upon the court wizard’s face, making his expression even darker than normal, but Tregar looked worried. He signalled that Seama should step back a few paces.
‘Look,’ he said pointing back the way they had come.
Seama was surprised to see that, easy to miss walking up but in plain sight from where he stood, the tunnel had a spur. An unpleasant, tight looking thing.
‘Where does that go?’
‘Oh not far. Just to a room. I guess it’s a cave the builders used to keep their gear in – lots of rusted metal in there, other stuff. But look at this.’
A few feet in was a door-frame but the lintel and posts had given way, and the heavy door had fallen down and together with the rubble it half blocked the entrance.
‘There’s a bad smell to the place,’ Seama said, his dislike of the Back Passage increasing by the minute. ‘I wonder why they put a door in there?’
‘No idea. Keep out a draft? Keep the smell in? Who knows, but that’s not what bathers me. Last time I was here that door was in its place, sturdy as ye like.’
‘So? It’s hundreds of years old by your reckoning – as we were saying everything falls down eventually.’
‘But what if it’s this cantrip?’
‘What, so far down? Seems unlikely.’ Seama rubbed his hand across a patch of the wall nearby. ‘Up above, if you rub at the walls the surface is loose, friable; the grains come apart. Solid rock down here though. I think we’ll be fine.’
Tregar grimaced. He wasn’t so certain. ‘Well let’s hope so. I wouldn’t much like to get stuck down here. Luckily the contraption’s not far now: we’ll soon be out.’
It was when Tregar admitted he didn’t know which bolt to pull that Seama began to think he had made a mistake. They could by now have been rumbling up the Castle hill in a cart, slowly and steadily. And safely. He had presumed Tregar knew what he was up to.
‘What’s the worry, Seama? If I pull the wrong one, we’ll just never get moving. And then I’ll know.’
‘You sure?’
The contraption was a stone platform with three walls around it – making it seem as though the tunnel had come to a dead end – and no roof above, just a shaft: an empty, vertiginous ascent into the dark. The platform quivered as they stepped onto it. On either side, on identical metal poles fixed into the platform, were the main release handles, full rings of iron the size of a large fist and above them, in series, three bolts with simple cross pieces. The ballast bolts and the release handles slid into a slot lined with greased iron made in the side walls. The middle ballast bolts on either side had been pulled back out of the slot.
‘Look, the middle bolts are set for two normal people or one heavy person like me; the others make the platform lighter, or heavier. It’s that simple.’
‘Right.’
‘Ah, away with ye. It’ll be fine.’
And with that assurance Tregar pulled simultaneously at both of the lowest bolts. There was a squeal of metal on metal and then a shudder. But that was all.
‘See what did I tell ye. There’s another weight released. Now then…’
He laid his paws on the handles.
‘Always a bit better if you can pull both at the same time or it wobbles a bit when it starts.’
He pulled.
The platform stayed where it was.
‘A bit stiff,’ he growled. ‘Don’t think I pulled them out enough. Will we do one each, d’ye think?’
Seama, feeling very uncertain about the whole thing, nodded reluctant agreement, planted his feet eighteen inches apart for better balance and grasped the left hand release.
‘Here goes then. One, two, three, PULL!’
The bars grated against their holes but then came free, and in a stately, pleasing fashion the platform began to rise, though with increasing speed.
‘See,’ Tregar said with a grin, ‘Easy as pie. Don’t worry about the speed, there are dampers to slow us down at the t—’
It was at this moment of comforting vindication that the remaining ballast fell off completely.
They hurtled up the shaft as if shot from a catapult, the platform bashing at the sides, knocking the pair of them off their feet. Seama had time only to scream: ‘You said there’d be—’ before they smashed through the rotten timbers of a trap door, launched up at a ceiling of powdery plaster, now with less momentum, and finally came tumbling to a halt upon a cracked slate-stone floo
r.
Seama allowed himself a few moments to establish that he was still a single piece before completing his earlier thought in an accusatory tone:
‘You said there were dampers!’
He glared at Tregar who looked as if he might like to reply but all that came out of his mouth was vomit once more.
‘Charming.’
Exhausted by the motion, Tregar rolled onto his back, wiping his mouth with an already disgusting sleeve.
‘You just going to lie there?’
‘S’ms like goo’idea,’ Tregar managed, but then moved slightly, shifting his body off one of the larger pieces of wood making up his sick bed.
‘Bit of a surprise,’ he grunted, ‘The trap. Wasn’t there b’fore. More like a cabinet thing. Ye slowed te a halt and then just opened the doors.’
‘How long ago was that?’
‘Three years, mebbee.’
The rotten planks of the trapdoor had disintegrated into a shower of spars and splinters and dust all around them. Seama swept his hands over the floor and gathered up two handfuls of the detritus.
‘Three years only and the timber’s as bad as this?’ he said as he let the stuff trickle through his fingers.
‘Dry rot?’
‘Decay, Tregar – and I don’t think it took three years. More like three weeks. Thank gods the kitchen girls never stood on it.’
He pushed himself to his feet.
‘C’mon Tregar. By the look of it the blight is getting worse – by the hour.’
They passed along ill lit corridors and up narrow bare staircases to reach the public levels of the Palace, and all the while Tregar grumbled away about the filthy floors and the grimy doors. Seama became excessively irritable.