The Black Knife

by Christopher Nuttall

  He grinned at Hind, who sensed his rueful amusement, and led her out of the harbour and through the streets of Larkrise City. He’d walked them many times before, sometimes openly and sometimes cloaked by an illusion spell, yet now that he had had experience of many different cities, he realised just how different Larkrise City truly was. It was, in many ways, the real heart of the Empire, for the various rulers had encouraged the traders to expand their trading links and help bind the Empire closer together. If Herod took the city…Eric knew exactly what would happen. Larkrise would be destroyed as a warning to all commoners that they needed to know their place and stay there.

  The Castle rose up in front of him and he studied it, remembering exercises when he’d been forced to work through ways of attacking and defending the building. It was a dark forbidding construction, made from solid stone and impregnated with enough ancient magic to be almost invulnerable; indeed, it had never been successfully taken by force. Eric had been taught, though, that that was no guarantee of invincibility. During the Succession Wars, centuries ago, Larkrise Castle had been starved out several times. He smiled, looked up at the stone swords someone had thoughtfully carved into the castle’s walls and started across the drawbridge. The creatures in the moat looked up, recognised him and retreated back into the water.

  “What,” Hind demanded, “are they?”

  Eric followed her gaze. She was looking down at a pair of eyes, watching them from just under the water’s surface. It was impossible to get any idea of just what the creature actually looked like, but it was clearly massive and very dangerous. Something broke the water a few meters away, vanishing before they could get a clear look at it, leaving only a suggestion of tentacles and hundreds of staring eyes. Eric smiled at her nervousness, even though he’d felt the same way too. The creatures in the moat were very dangerous and loyal only to the Emperor’s Bloodline.

  “We’re not quite sure,” he admitted. He’d obsessively researched the creatures in all of the libraries he'd been able to access, but none of them had held much actual information. The creatures came from an unknown location, had unknown powers and had somehow been bound to the Emperor’s service – no one knew how. Eric wondered now if it had something to do with the stockpile of hidden knowledge his father had intended to share with him, just before he’d been murdered. “All we know is that they’re loyal and very dangerous if someone we don’t want tries to cross the bridge.”

  He grinned. “Back when I was playing Prince of Larkrise, some idiot decided to try swimming in the moat,” he added. “The monsters played with him for an hour and then threw him back onto dry land. He didn’t intend to break into the castle, apparently; he just wanted to have fun. I guess the fun had him instead.”

  They stepped through the gate and were confronted by a pair of guards, wearing the red and white livery of the Royal Family. “Halt,” the lead guard said. “Who are you?”

  Eric smiled. “I am Eric, seventh of that name, Prince of Larkrise and Emperor-in-Waiting,” he said, calmly. The gate was protected by a truth spell that ensured that everyone who was challenged would answer honestly, perhaps even without thinking. Truth spells could be tricked, with some mental effort, but that required prior preparation and awareness. Very few people recognised the castle’s truth spell until they walked right into it. “I have come to reclaim what is mine.”

  The two guards stared at him and then dropped to their knees. “Welcome home, Your Highness,” the leader said. “The Lady Yvonne is in the study, managing the estates. Do you wish escorted to her?”

  “I wish to go to my quarters and change,” Eric said, calmly. “Please send a message to her and General Berwick that I wish to see them in the War Room, one hour from now.”

  “Of course, Your Highness,” the guard said. “I shall have them informed at once.”

  Eric watched Hind’s reaction carefully as they walked through the castle and into the rooms that belonged to the Prince of Larkrise. He had intended that they should spend at least some of their honeymoon in the kingdom, but Herod had seen to it that they had had to run instead of learning about each other the easy way. The apartment had been kept for him - Lady Yvonne, the Viceroy, had her own apartments – and it was easy to find his clothes and change into something more suitable for his title. It was harder to find something for Hind, but some of the maids were able to rustle up a golden dress that matched her hair and contrasted neatly with her green eyes. Branet was escorted down to the rooms that Eleanor had used when she was a girl and placed into the care of a pair of maids, who promised to ensure that she was well taken care of, at least until Eric could return. He explained that he’d adopted her and the maids fell over themselves to look after her, knowing that a word from an adopted royal child could make or break their careers.

  “So,” Eric said finally. “What do you think of it?”

  Hind pretended to consider it. “I think it’s astonishing that you turned out as well as you did,” she said, finally. “If people bowed and scraped to you from when you were a child, you could have turned into a little monster.”

  “My father wouldn’t have allowed me to become a monster,” Eric admitted. He felt a sudden pang of loneliness and rage…and regret. They’d reached their destination and now he had to be the Prince again, even though it meant that he had to put Hind to one side, if only for the moment. “He was always warning me to watch what I did and threatening to beat me if I abused my power or the people placed into my care.”

  He shook his head. “There are times when I thought that this kingdom was the hardest place to govern on the planet and times when I thought it practically ran itself,” he added. “I had to learn how to convince everyone to do as I said, or to do what was best for them, or to put forward ideas and suggestions when I had none…it was the hardest time of my life.”

  Hind grinned. “Was it harder than the Academy?”

  “The Academy…well, at the Academy, I never had someone else relying on me,” Eric said. He grinned back at her and extended his arm. She took it gratefully as they turned towards the door. “Here…there are over a hundred thousand people living in the kingdom, with over twenty thousand of them living in the city below the castle. They all depended upon me.”

  His face clouded over as he recalled learning just how the city worked. The tutors had taken him through the city and walked him through everything, from the cleaners who tried to keep it reasonably tidy to the sewers that served to drain away the city’s wastes. Without the sewers, they’d explained, the city would swiftly suffocate under its own wastes, while disease and deprivation would spread rapidly. Eric had learned that everything was interlinked, from the water pipes that pumped water through the streets providing fresh water for the population to the shops and food prices that were everyone’s greatest concern. As a Prince, he had never had to worry about money, until he’d been forced to work through a poorer person’s budget. It had been a hard lesson in just how difficult life could be as a commoner. Very few nobles ever realised that they didn’t understand just how the other nine-tenths lived.

  “If you put up food prices, you make it harder for the poorer people to buy food,” his old tutor had said. “If you lower food prices, you make it harder for the farmers to turn a profit and then they lose interest in planting and harvesting food. If you tax lightly, there will be no income for the crown; if you tax heavily, there will be no business and therefore no income for the crown. If you poke somewhere, somewhere else may say ouch.”

  Eric looked up at Hind and shook his head. “Come on,” he said. “We have a war to plan.”

  The War Room was supposed to be the oldest room in the Castle, decorated in a style that had gone out of fashion centuries ago and somehow never returned to popularity. It was covered with maps and charts of Larkrise and the surrounding area, including several ocean charts that marked the presence of mermaid kingdoms that had vanished long ago, either deeper into the waters or destroyed by enemy actions. The
various Emperors had kept the room updated, with maps of Touched and places where Imperial forces might be expected to see action, but it had rarely been used for its intended purpose. The Emperors had never had the clout to punish a noble too severely, if only for fear that it might unite the other nobles against them. Now, of course…

  “Eric,” Lady Yvonne called. “How good it is to see you again!”

  Eric found himself wrapped up in a hug that almost choked the life out of him. Lady Yvonne was nearly sixty years old and still going strong, thanks to powerful healing magic that she had learned as a small child and obsessively applied to her body every day. She was the daughter of one of the smallest – and yet most loyal – Lords in Larkrise and she had enjoyed the confidence of his father, to the point where she had been appointed to serve as his Viceroy in Larkrise. After Eric’s mother had died, she had become almost a surrogate mother, educating the young prince and refusing to take any nonsense from him.

  “It’s good to see you too,” he said, once she had released him. He performed a quick introduction for Hind, who studied Lady Yvonne carefully before shaking her hand. “How much have you heard?”

  “Only that the forces of the false Emperor, Herod, have invaded and destroyed Braidburn City,” General Berwick growled. Eric looked up at him, remembering the experienced General who had taught a young prince the basics of military strategy. General Berwick was horribly scarred – he’d once given Eric nightmares for a week by telling him how he’d been scarred – yet there was a certain kindness underlying his words. “We have been preparing for his arrival ever since.”

  Eric felt his blood run cold. “He’s coming here,” he said. It was hardly unexpected – Herod could do nothing else – but it was still alarming. He’d hoped for several months to build up his forces, yet they’d be lucky if they had even a single month. “Please show me on the map.”

  General Berwick led the way over to one of the smaller tables, where a large map of the continent had been carefully positioned and marked. “We received word two days ago that the city had been invested and destroyed,” he said. “The bastard has enough sorcerers in his army to make mental communication difficult, but some of our…ah, people in the city were able to get word out to us through trained messenger birds. Herod has amassed an army of around twenty thousand men and is coming in our direction.”

  Eric looked up, surprised. “He’s really managed to assemble twenty thousand men?”

  “That’s what the report says,” General Berwick said. “It may be an exaggeration, but I don’t think so. The people we had in the city were reliable.” His voice darkened. “We haven’t heard anything from them since.”

  Eric stared down at the map. “Twenty thousand men…that’s the largest army someone has assembled for a long time,” he said. His finger traced out a line on the map. “He can’t mean to take so many men across the Desert of Death. They’d never be able to supply them with water and they’d all die in transit. They could only get a small party across the desert.”

  “They’d have to go via the Water-of-Life,” General Berwick agreed. “Even if they could carry enough food to get them across the desert, they’d be dead by the time they arrived…unless he has enough power to open a Gate.”

  Eric looked up at Hind, who shook her head. “Opening a Gate isn’t easy when there are opposing wards,” she said. Gates hadn’t been used in combat since the Necromantic Wars, when magicians had discovered how to configure relatively minor wards to prevent the enemy from opening Gates in their territory and attacking into their rear. “It doesn’t matter how much power he has to spare. It’s a question of holding an incredibly complex spell against opposition. It’s not possible.”

  “I see,” Eric said. “Logistics, logistics, logistics…why isn’t he coming the long way around and avoiding the desert entirely?”

  “Perhaps he is and he attacked the city so that we didn’t realise what he was actually doing,” General Berwick suggested. “Or he could have attacked the city so that he could test his new army under combat conditions.”

  Eric shook his head. “I know Herod,” he said, slowly. “He’s not that subtle.”

  “Subtle enough to pull a coup off against your father,” Lady Yvonne pointed out, sardonically. Eric scowled at her, but she refused to be dismayed. “Going this way lets him get an army into this country as quickly as possible, without having to fight his way through several kingdoms, bleeding men and support all the way.”

  “He’ll bleed more men if he tries to cross the desert,” General Berwick muttered. “It isn’t called the Desert of Death for nothing.”

  Eric studied the map for a long moment, considering. “He can’t get the army across the desert, so he has to come via the river,” he said. The Water-of-Life ran through the Desert of Death and down to the sea, providing the only large supply of fresh water in the desert. There were small water pools and sources within the desert, but none of them could have supplied an entire army. “Once he gets through the desert, he has to cross the gap here” – he tapped a location where a mountain range blocked the desert from reaching the farmland on the other side – “and then head on into Larkrise. Does that make sense?”

  “It is the only way he can hope to get an army into position,” General Berwick said. “I’m glad to see that some of my lessons made an impact.”

  “They all made an impact,” Eric said, remembering some of the early lessons in fighting while wearing heavy armour and carrying a sword several sizes too big for him. The General had claimed that it had been to teach the young prince how to adapt quickly, but Eric had thought – at the time – that it was nothing more than an exercise in sadism. The General had had leave to beat him and even though he never had, the threat had always been present. “We have to meet them at the gap. There’s nowhere else that we can hope to stop them.”

  “You mean using the fort there,” General Berwick said. “I checked the fort out several months ago. The garrison hadn’t been maintaining it properly and it could be taken, given a certain willingness to accept casualties.”

  “And Herod doesn’t give two figs about casualties,” Eric muttered. “He’s a necromancer. He doesn’t give a damn about deaths on either side.”

  “Oh no,” Hind said, suddenly. Eric felt her shock through the ring. “We’ve been looking at this the wrong way.”

  “I do beg your pardon,” General Berwick said, sharply. “I am an experienced General and…”

  “Leave it,” Eric snapped. Hind was his wife…but even if she hadn’t been, he had never doubted her mind. “Hind, what are you thinking…?”

  “We missed the obvious,” Hind said. “You’re treating this as a regular campaign. The history books say that one of the reasons the First Emperor became the First Emperor was because he had a kingdom that was hard to invade, yet also had serious problems in projecting power outside its own borders. Correct?”

  Eric nodded, impatiently. “But Herod is a necromancer and he has been reanimating zombies,” she said. “Zombies don’t need to eat, or drink, or sleep; they never slow down. You think that Herod has to move his army up the river, but he can send his zombies ahead of him and get them to the gap before you get your own forces there. Zombies don’t get lost either. He can just march them across the desert and get here before we even know we’re under attack.”

  “And he’s been one step ahead of us the whole time,” Eric breathed. She was right. He knew she was right. “The gods help us.”

  “The gods help those who help themselves,” General Berwick said. “With your permission, Your Highness, I suggest that we begin deploying troops now. We will not go down easily, even against zombies and darkest magic.”

  Chapter Forty-Three

  “It’s getting worse,” Eleanor said, as she tried to breathe though the cloth she’d wrapped over her nose and mouth. “It’s really getting worse.”

  Sir Pellaeon looked back at her, his own face half-hidden behind a similar piece
of cloth. “It’s going to get worse yet,” he said, grimly. She could see his beard sticking out of the cloth and realised suddenly that he couldn’t protect himself, at least not completely. “We have barely reached the fringes of the Desert of Death.”

  Eleanor nodded, despite her inner turmoil. They'd been riding hard ever since they had picked up new supplies, without going into any of the cities or larger towns that they’d passed on the way. They had paused at some of the smaller villages and purchased food and water, yet the inhabitants had known nothing about what was going on – and cared less. She hadn’t realised just how circumscribed the boundaries of a person living on a farm actually were, particularly when there was no hope of ever leaving the farm. They were barely aware of their own Lord – and that was only because he sent out the unpopular tax gatherers every few months – and knew nothing about the Emperor, or the Empire. They did as little as they could to avoid punishment and otherwise just went on their own merry way.