Chapter Six: Traitor's Blade
Ms. Kindler's command echoed through the auction hall, ringing even over the clamor of the dozens of attendees straining for a better view of the ruckus. Through the hall's double doors—opened wide to accommodate the dowager and her wheeled chair—danced the lobby's prism filtered lights, and beyond that, streetlamps glinting through a light fog, a cloak to cover my escape, if only I could reach it.
Narrowing my eyes at Kindler I charged toward her, her arm still outstretched, accusing. "Bitch," I mouthed, exaggerating the silent word to make sure it was clear on the unfamiliar lips of Mr. Baldermol's illusory face. The tug of a suppressed smirk assured me she caught my meaning as I sped up the aisle's thick trail of red. With no time to slow and squeeze past the old woman, I sprinted to within a yard of her and launched myself. Mrs. Kindler snapped her extended arm back, a mousey squeak escaping her lips as my feet brushed the far armrest. The commotion from the hall behind me confirmed what I imagined was a ludicrous sight, Mr. Baldermol's ungainly body balling up upon itself to vault the old woman with uncanny agility.
I landed with a skid but barely lost any speed, the pillow wrapped around the infernal dagger still slung soundly under my arm and I sped on. My breath momentarily caught in my chest as something clattered heavily behind me and I heard Ms. Kindler wail. Venturing a glance I saw the old woman's contraption upset across the floor, wheels spinning impotently, with Ms. Kindler thrown headlong onto the thick carpet, her spindly limbs flailing with uncharacteristic helplessness. I almost halted, but was sure I hadn't struck her with enough force to unseat her so.
Then came the house guards, their chipped black batons drawn from disheveled cummerbunds. The first reached the door at a rush, the up thrust wheel of Ms. Kindler's chair catching him just above the knee, spilling him over it in an awkward tangle of ill-fitting formalwear and curse words. The next guard was right on his heels and nearly trampled Ms. Kindler, halting just in time to avoid her, but too fast to prevent one of his compatriots from crashing into his back. Both toppled to the floor, even more thoroughly jamming the door with bodies.
Suddenly, no one was pursing me. I couldn't help but chuckle, shaking my head at the wily old woman's distraction. Nodding to a pair of baffled footmen minding the house doors I raced onto the street and into the night's fog.
∗ ∗ ∗
"A fair stretch finer than yours it appears, thank you for asking," Ms. Kindler said stiffly, picking her way back through the sitting room and into the kitchen, leaving me to make myself comfortable and wonder if she had expected an inquiry about her evening through the door. I found my way to the straight-backed lavender settee and took a seat.
I'd spent the last several hours wandering the alleys and backstreets of Ardis, letting the ringman's illusionary guise fade away, then making triple sure no one was following me. Only then had I decided it'd be safe enough to make my way back to Ms. Kindler's home.
He voice drifted in from the kitchen amid the clatter of dishware, "Omberbain was a pretty package of livid after you made your exit, ending the auction and hustling the crowd off as fast as he could. He even offered me anything on the block for three-quarters value—his way of either thanks or apology, I'm not sure. But I talked him into giving me that tea setting, for free."
Her freshly won treasure was sitting on the centre table, a slaver, several tall cups, and a pot like a fat peacock, all in copper. The thing wallowed in its own ostentatiousness. Leaning forward absently, I pressed down the pot lid's ornate lever and let it drop with a hollow clang.
"Ugly thing, isn't it?" her voice came again. "He said it was Thuvian, but I know a copy when I see it. Regardless, losing it is sure to keep that greedy fop up nights for a full week." I could practically hear her wily little smile.
She came in a moment later, carrying a familiar porcelain pot and two cups on a sterling tray. Jostling her new prize out if the way with the favored setting, she sat in the armchair across from me and poured deliberately. For a moment, she actually looked like a respectable old gentlewoman should.
Accepting a steaming teacup, I had nearly taken a sip before smelling the whiskey in bore. Looking across the table at her, Ms. Kindler sipped daintily, as though this were common for polite company. Catching my look, her only explanation was the briefest shrug of thin eyebrows before taking another nip.
"So, lets see it," she said, lowering her cup but keeping it handy. Putting down my dangerous drink I unwrapped the bundled I'd created after my escape, exposing the fiendish weapon within. Its ruby embedded hilt glimmered unnaturally in the light, the stone's cut irregular, savage even, seeming to capture and hold light within rather than reflecting it away.
"I hate this thing," I said as I thought it, looking down at the profane blade.
Ms. Kindler nodded, "Funny how rarely we want the burdens we pick up."
She stood and crossed to a curio-laden bookshelf and produced another sheathed dagger, a simple thing with the design of wings upon the hilt. Drawing it, she replaced the naked blade upon the shelf and returned to her seat, setting the sheath of leather and blue ribbon before her. "That should hold it. You don't want to go running around with it bared, especially if its cut is as nasty as you suspect."
I took the sheath and slid the dagger inside. The fit was a bit loose, but it would do. "Trust me, I don't plan to simply go running around with this damnable thing at all."
"Dear girl," she said with a regretful seriousness that immediately seized my attention, "sharing your intentions is the surest way to make the Lady laugh."
My brow furrowed.
"That tea setting," she started with a nod. "Omberbain was selling it on behalf of an estate. Your accomplice from the other night, Lord Troidais, was supposed to be at the auction this evening. He never arrived."
∗ ∗ ∗
The Troidais house was dark, its outline only visible by the shape it displaced in the night's fog. I'd bolted out of Ms. Kindler's home still dressing, the dash far easier in my own clothes rather than that baggy maid's uniform. The city sped by me in a fever dream of half-formed apparitions and muffled noises, the fog off the river dense and growing thicker, as though it would smother the city should the promised dawn come one moment to late. Through my midnight run I could hear the dagger rattling at my side, clinking incessantly in its ill fitting sheathe. It almost seemed to be vibrating, tingling at my side, the vile thing agitated by the activity after so long a slumber.
Bounding up the big house's stairs I rapidly bludgeoned the door. Should Rarentz be home and Ms. Kindler mistaken in his evening's missed appointment this would be unforgivably discourteous. But urgency seemed to be out weighing courtesy with some regularity as of late. My first volley not having been immediately answered I didn't give the sturdy door time to recover, launching another barrage.
It cracked open with the meekest slowness, making me think for an instant that I'd knocked it loose. As though doing so took some effort, pale hands reached around the door and pulled it fully open.
Liscena Ferendri slouched in the entry of the lightless house, wrapped in a blanket like a child just unmasked while playing at being a ghost. She might as well have been one for all the noise she made and the lifeless blankness of her eyes.
It all came out in a rush, my urgency halted only as I strained to catch my breath after the run. "Liscena! Thank the Lady. Is Rarentz here?" When she didn't respond immediately, I surged on. "Rarentz? Lord Troidais? Upstairs maybe?" Her vacant stare deflected each question. "Do you know—anything? By the goddess girl say something!" I was trying not to be short with her, I know she'd lost much, but if what I imagined had occurred Rarentz's time might be as short as my patience.
Still she just stared, her head lolling slightly, casting her blank gaze into the dark. I could feel my pulse in my lips I'd pinched them together so tightly, resisting the urge to slap the words out of the girl. An extended sigh helped me gain some small amount of ground on my rapidly retreating
composure. I put my hand firmly on Liscena's shoulder, physically but gently guiding her attention back to me.
"Liscena. I need to find Rarentz," I said, trying to keep my voice even and words simple. "I think he's in danger. I'm trying to stop something terrible from happening to him," I paused, hoping it just needed a moment to sink in. "Something like what happened to Garmand."
That last bit was a cheap shot—Liscena looked up at me immediately—but it worked. The tears that instantly welled up in her eyes washed away the blankness. Though I hadn't wanted to make the traumatized girl cry, it was good to see there was still something of a person hiding behind that corpse's stare.
Her first attempt at words was nothing but a dry whimper, but the second attempt was a little better, each sound a sob given a measure of meaning. "The thing… from the crypt was here. The one that got…" she halted, the lake of tears in her eyes overflowed their shores in a cascade down her cheeks. She didn't sob, though, and as a credit to what strength was left in her, continued on. "With men. Silent men in old, dark cloaks. They came out of the night and took him."
"Took him? Where!?" I insisted, grasping for any details I could before she lapsed back into her stupor.
"Coronation," she breathed, the words dripping out almost as softly as her tears. "It said it wanted them all there… for its coronation."
∗ ∗ ∗
For thousands of years the near legendary kings of Ustalav ruled their people from the nation's heart, the city—this city—of Ardis. And for much of that time, the regalia adorning the country's royal city was Stagcrown. Called a palace, the seat of the nation's rulers came from a different time, when ancient lords feared that any day barbarian hordes might surge back across their newly marked borders and their dalliances as kings might come to a bloody end. Although it had been rebuilt and renovated countless times over the centuries, Stagcrown's silhouette was still that of a frontier fortress, its spires and battlements just as ominous after courtiers and aristocrats replaced the knights and barbarians battling for its walls.
But now even those days were gone. Stagcrown stood abandoned, the nation's royal court having relocated decades ago to the city of Caliphas over the mountains to the south. Now the former throne of Ustalav stood in state, the city's rulers holding it as a monument to the nation's idealized history, assuring its safety and preparedness for the unreciprocated promise of the court's return.
Tonight, it's gates stood open once more.
This didn't make any sense. I'd witnessed Prince Lieralt pass through stone and bars, this gate should have proven no barrier. Who, then, were the prince's collaborators? Could, after a hundred years, the ghost have vassals still? The thought of facing Prince Lieralt again had been dreadful enough, but I'd always expected we'd share even numbers. This was a most unwelcome turn, but my curiosity into who might follow a dead prince was piqued.
I slipped through the towering black doors and into the fortress.
Within stretched a lengthy courtyard, surrounded by ancillary buildings and the wings of the palace proper, all ornamented with the cathedral-like spires, statues of horned knights, and friezes of grim cherubs popular in centuries past. Above rose the Palace Tower, one of Ustalav's most famed landmarks and national symbol, yet also the source of a thousand legends, tales of suicidal princesses and starved captives who stalked the palace grounds on foggy nights. Nights like this. I kept to the shadows of the walls, moving swiftly to elude what I imagined watched from above, or real spectators spying from any of the palace's hundred windows.
At the yard's end, the face of the palace extended in an elaborate porte-cochère, its symmetrical pillars supporting balconies studded with statues, anonymous in the fog. Something in those shadows moved. It was nothing more than a shifting of fog and shades of black, but I was sure it was more than just nerves and mist. Crouching in the dark, several breaths passed before I saw it again. It was a window, which something had passed by. Then again. And again. Figures walking in line, as though in some grim processional.
Once the forms seemed to have passed, I crept under the portico, slipping between pillars patterned with knights and huntsmen. Here the main entrance into the palace stood partially open as well. Had the fortress's royal former inhabitants been hosting a midnight ball I imagined the entry might have looked much as it did now, inviting guests to partake of the festivities within. Yet I couldn't shake the feeling that I'd forgotten my invitation. Watchful for whatever had moved, I cautiously slipped inside.
Within rose a foreboding foyer, elegant with shadows and the silhouettes of darkened masterpieces. Chandeliers sprouting the antlers of dozens of stags and hundreds of unlit candles hung lifeless in the gloom. Whoever had been invited to tonight's event apparently wasn't interested in the royal décor. Yet, that they hadn't tarried here was a relief, the dusty smelling hall almost perfectly still. All that moved was the faintest flickers of light from the ornate doors at the long chamber's end. Light that, as I watched, was snuffed to faint slit by the door's closing.
I chased after the light, doing my best to keep my footfalls from echoing upon the dark tile floor, it being my only destination in the darkness of the deeper hall. Listening at the cold metal, not a sound came from within, and I knelt to peer through the gap between door and floor. I could tell the room beyond was vast, but could see little more than a few inches off the cold stone floor. Especially as something was blocking my view: a body, dropped in the chamber's center.
Seeing and hearing nothing else, and fearful that I might be looking at Rarentz's corpse, I prayed the hall be as empty as it appeared and pushed upon the door to peer beyond.
Twin braziers lit the ancestral throne room of generations of Ustalavic rulers, a crypt of forsaken opulence rising intimidating and forlorn. Columns marching along the chamber's edge supported tiered galleries above the business of the audience floor. Banners and decorations that once festooned the balconies hung moth eaten and rotting, sagging from the shadowy heights like the webs of some massive, lurking spider queen. Yet the focal point of the chamber was the throne, a majestically grim thing of silver, ebony, and oily purple silk upon a frame of deepest black marble. And the figure upon the throne, Prince Lieralt Ordranti.
He was much as I had seen him in the alley two nights past, yet, like then, he seemed even more there, healed, if one can say such things of the dead. Where my first sight of him had been of a corpse riddled with wounds, they had faded in the days since. Now only one marred his noble form, a gash at the center of his chest. One wound. One victim remaining—Troidais.
The prince wasn't alone, though. While I had been prepared for the terror of his wandering soul, the murdered royal had somehow drawn a vestige of his long dead court from Stagcrown's haunted stones. Seeming to fade in and out of existence, chilling vapors as insubstantial as the night's fog floated through the hall, the shades of a hundred grim courtiers and aristocrats. The costumes of an age past adorned aristocrats the very memory of which had rotted away, their spectral finery draping mere skeletons. Skeletal ladies and lords waited in uncanny silence, patience for the commands of their spectral prince. A chill seized me as I wondered if I were glimpsing the afterlife itself.
Yet one figure was definitely real. Rarentz, lying at the room's center, unmoving and, I hoped, only unconscious.
"This place is no longer for the living, good lady" came the prince's slow, formal words, echoing their deadliness through the crowded chamber's unsettling quiet. "Leave."
I'd be lying to say that I bravely stood my ground. Truth be told, I almost obeyed. Part of me was screaming for an excuse to flee, and there the greatest terror I'd ever known bid me do just that. But another part of me, a part I'm sure will someday kill me, knew that if I fled, I'd be saving my own life at the cost of another's. I held my ground, and took what I hope looked like a deliberate step into the crowd of souls.
Swallowing hard, I prayed my words wouldn't betray my fear. "Lord Ordranti, apologies, but I can't. Not
when the one you've taken is innocent."
Dozens of gazes, eyes replaced by oblivion's absolute black, turned to face me, hollow and dispassionate. All but one pair, the prince's eyes smoldered.
Raising his hands in an imperious gesture, the crowd parted and three figures in heavy cloaks dragged themselves forth. These were more solid than the room's other terrors, things with form and flesh and faces. Yet I wish they hadn't, for those features were what made two of them instantly recognizable, the corpulent Lord Halboncrant and the once proud Garmand Ferendri, both now lifeless, walking corpses.
"And these?" the prince tested. "Were these innocents as well?"
"Of your murder, yes." I said, trying to walk the line between respect and insistence. "Your highness, you were killed over a hundred years ago. Those who betrayed you have met their punishment in death."
The prince shook his head thoughtfully. "Did they? And what do you know of death's punishments?" he waited, baiting me to test my empty religious rote against his deathless perspective. I deferred. "Do these, then, look like the sons of traitors? The shamed offspring of criminals punished for betraying their families' most sacred duties?"
With another gesture the corpses staggered forward, ungainly and slow, but still with some measure of the dignity they held in life, the already reeking Halboncrant still draped in his silks and gaudy jewelry.
"This land's honor is dead. I knew that in my time, and was killed for daring to free my people from the exploitations of families called noble only as a matter of tradition. I see now that Ustalav has fallen from a nation of heroes to a nation of victims. So be it, then. It is my will that all be equally victimized, starting with those most deserving of justice: traitors to the crown."
"Who are you to judge me, who should be your prince!"
He pointed, taking in the three dead men and Rarentz upon the ground. "Should the sons of traitors continue to enjoy the privileges of their titles? Should a master keep a servant who steals from him? And by extension, should a ruler heap favor upon families who repays him with treason? Just as the greedy servant is cast out of the house, so too will the traitor lines be ended."
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