The Skewed Throne

by Joshua Palmatier

  I stood against one wall, a few paces distant, where I always stood. The large room, with the chairs, the tables, the scattering of statues and vases and shaped stones, felt hollow and empty.

  Borund reached for the glass without looking, tipped it back with a violent gesture, and swallowed the remaining wine, placing the glass back on the table gently. His eyes never left the blank spot on the wall in front of him.

  I shifted uncomfortably.

  “He began his apprenticeship with me when he was nine, you know,” Borund said suddenly, his voice too loud in the silence.

  I didn’t respond, watching him warily. It had been two days since we’d brought William back to the manse and Borund hadn’t left the grounds once. He’d barely left his office, Gerrold bringing him food and wine. Lots of wine. Borund had sent Gerrold and Gart back to the street where we’d been attacked with a cart to take care of the bodies, but when Gerrold and the stableboy returned, they’d reported they’d found only blood on the cobbles. No bodies. Someone had already carted them away. Charls wouldn’t have wanted Borund’s body to be found in the middle ward. Not when he needed everyone to believe that the deaths were accidents. He must have had a cart waiting, ready to transport the corpses.

  He just didn’t get the corpses he expected.

  A few doors away, William slept fitfully and deeply. Isaiah had stopped the bleeding eventually, had cleansed and sewn shut the wound, but he’d said it was up to the Mistress whether William would live. The knife had gone deep, and William had lost more blood than he’d ever seen a man lose before and still live. There was nothing any of us could do now except wait.

  Borund smiled. “I remember him standing at the edge of the desk, barely able to contain himself, his hands twitching as he clutched them behind his back. He’d glare at me when I ordered him to stand still. Oh, not openly. When he thought I wasn’t looking. And he hated keeping the records, writing down all those numbers in the logbooks, keeping track of the price of acquisition, the price the goods were sold for, the amount of the sale and to whom.” Borund’s smile widened. “But he got over that with time.” His voice was slightly slurred, the imperfections caused by the wine barely noticeable.

  He looked up at me. “You don’t read or write, do you?” He didn’t wait for an answer, merely grunted, as if he were disgusted with himself for not thinking about it in the first place. “We’ll have to fix that. But not today.”

  It’s what he’d said about the horses. I hadn’t ridden one yet.

  His attention faded for a moment, then focused on the empty glass. He shifted forward enough so that he could reach the decanter and poured himself another glass, taking a good swallow before dropping back into his chair with a heavy sigh.

  “Nine,” he muttered, and his eyes darkened. “The bastard.”

  I knew he wasn’t talking about William anymore. Over the last two days, he’d only talked of two things: memories of William. . . .

  And Charls.

  I shifted again, straightened slightly, suddenly attentive. The last few days I’d moved around the manse in a state of shock much like Borund’s. This morning, something had changed. I’d had an idea. But I didn’t know if Borund would agree to it.

  “The bloody bastard,” Borund hissed. “Vincentt, Sedwick, Terell, Marcus . . . all dead. Accidents, my ass.” He took another swallow. “Charls has to be stopped.”

  I shifted forward, hesitated barely a breath, then said coldly, “I can do it.”

  He didn’t seem to hear at first, his gaze fixed again on the blank wall. Then he looked up, almost startled. But the expression faded fast, smoothed out into cold consideration, the expression of a merchant, weighing options, gains, risks.

  This didn’t last long either. The cold consideration of the merchant slowly shifted into dark anger. An anger I recognized. It was the anger that had seized me on the Dredge, when I’d gone in search of Bloodmark that final time, the same anger I’d felt on the street in the middle circle, when Borund had called me back from the hunt for the man who’d stabbed William.

  “You can kill him? Without being seen?” he asked.

  “It will take a little time. I’ll have to follow him, figure out his patterns. But I can do it.”

  Something between us shifted. For the last few months, he’d wavered between ordering me to do things, and asking me, one moment laughing and joking with me, the next wondering whether a bodyguard was necessary, worth the expense. It had been awkward and unsettling. He didn’t know whether to treat me as family, like William, or as a servant.

  But now, as he watched me, I saw his uncertainty over how to treat me, how to think of me, solidify.

  He’d seen me kill before, had seen me stand over the bodies. And this was the image that settled into his eyes there, in his office, as he leaned slightly forward, one hand resting on the desk. He saw me as I was: a dagger, a weapon, a tool.

  I’d never be family.

  Some part of me twisted inside, tightened with regret. But it was small and was smothered by anger. At that moment, I wanted Charls dead as well.

  “Then do it,” Borund said, and there was no longer a slur in his voice.

  I straightened, hand resting on my dagger.

  I would have done it anyway, no matter what Borund said.

  But it felt good to have his approval.

  I followed Charls and his men for the next two weeks, noted the taverns he liked to visit, the streets he traveled to get to his warehouses and the wharf, his manse behind the first set of walls in the residential district. At first, I stayed back, over fifty paces, just close enough I could keep him in sight. It wasn’t hard to track him; he always kept at least two men at his side, like that first night I’d seen him, outside Borund’s tavern. Bodyguards, like me. Gutterscum. But after a while I realized his bodyguards weren’t as wary as someone from the Dredge would be, and so I shifted closer. Not enough to catch their attention, but enough to note that I wouldn’t be able to kill Charls on the street, or at the warehouses or wharf. Not without being seen.

  That left only one option: his manse.

  At the end of one of these excursions, coming up onto the gates of Borund’s manse, I saw Avrell leaving through the side entrance to the gardens. He checked the night-darkened street, but didn’t see me. Then he drew a hood up over his head and moved away, toward the old city, his pace quick.

  I frowned, wondered what he had come to Borund to discuss. But I said nothing.

  That was Borund’s business. My business was Charls.

  And I was ready.

  I stood at the side of the bed and stared down at William, at his rounded face, his wild hair, his eyes closed in sleep. His breathing came in soft sighs, barely audible. Even in the moonlight that came in through the open window, I could see that the grayness of his skin had faded in the two weeks since the attack. He was still weak, could move about his room with the aid of the wall and the furniture, but it caused him extreme pain.

  The anger inside me writhed as I remembered how his face had contorted the first time he collapsed. Sweat had drenched his skin just from sitting upright. His face had blanched. When he’d tried to shift his weight to his legs, his feet hanging over the side of the bed, they’d given out, folded like cloth.

  He’d gasped as he was falling, but when he hit the floor, Borund not swift enough to catch him—

  I flinched back, heard the scream again, heard the agony. And as I drew in a deep breath I smelled the stench of his pain—old sweat and rotten meat.

  I shook myself. The anger held a moment more, then calmed. The remembered stench faded into the salt of the sea as a breeze pushed past the curtains at the window.

  William.

  His brow creased, face tightened. Sweat sheened his skin, and one arm twitched.

  “No,” he murmured. “No!”

  I reached forward, almost touched his cheek, but halted at the last moment.

  Something twisted in my stomach and I snatched my hand
back.

  I’d seen the way he looked at me at the tavern, after I’d killed that first man. Not fear. I’d seen fear plenty of times on the Dredge. No. William was more than afraid, he was terrified. Of me. Of what I could do, what I held inside. He was afraid of who I was.

  I crouched down beside the bed, shifted closer so that I could see William’s face better in the darkness. I could smell his sweat, his scent. On the sheets, in the air.

  His face was still contorted, and this close I could hear him whimpering.

  I’d come into his room every night since I’d offered to kill Charls, and every night William fell into nightmare. Borund didn’t know, but Lizbeth did. I wasn’t certain how, since I made certain no one was near before I came, but somehow she knew.

  Leaning even closer, I said softly, “Tonight.”

  William shook his head, mumbled “No” again, but the tension around his eyes relaxed. His brow smoothed and his breath calmed.

  I watched him a moment more, then looked up toward the window, out into the night.

  Tonight.

  Gerrold let me out of the side entrance, the one Borund and William had used to bring me to the manse. I stood in the shadow of its alcove and stared out at the side street. I wouldn’t move until the patrol had passed by.

  A few days after the attempt on Borund in the middle ward, palace guardsmen began to appear in the city. Patrols had wandered the city at random before; that had started even before I killed Bloodmark and fled along the Dredge. I remembered the woman who’d halted one that first day in the real Amenkor, remembered watching them move on the streets after that, some on horseback, others walking. But after the attack on Borund. . . .

  Now the guardsmen were everywhere, their patrols passing through the streets of the upper city at regular intervals, a few patrols scouring the wharf and docks below. Neither Borund nor I knew who had ordered them, Avrell or Baill. Perhaps it had been the Mistress. The guardsmen did nothing except ride by, watching, their eyes hard and dangerous, cold, their horses’ hooves clopping on the cobbles. No words were spoken, unless they were interrupting a fight. But they were felt.

  Instead of making Amenkor feel safer, the streets now felt closed, somehow restrictive. As if the hand resting at the back of your neck, meant to be reassuring, had suddenly grown more viselike.

  The first time Borund and I had seen them in the street, he’d watched them canter by with surprised approval. But when we’d passed the third patrol an hour later, he’d sent me a grim look, mouth pressed tight. “Heavy-handed,” he’d muttered.

  The rest of Amenkor agreed. I could see it in the people’s eyes, in the way they kept their heads down, shoulders lowered. Hooded capes had become common almost overnight.

  And it had made following Charls harder.

  I pulled back deeper into the alcove as I heard clipped hooves on stone. A moment later, two guardsmen appeared on horseback, moving sedately down the street. One of the horses snuffled and nodded its head as it passed, scenting me, but the guards didn’t pause.

  As soon as they vanished around the corner of the main thoroughfare, I slid from the alcove and into the lesser shadows of the street. I knew where I was headed: the outer circle of the old city, where most of the merchants had their own estates, including Charls.

  The streets of Amenkor were empty. Completely empty. It sent shivers down my back as I moved. On the Dredge and the wharf there were always movements, a sense of motion, even if the alley or street seemed clear. Things moved behind the walls, sometimes in the walls—dogs and rats and gutterscum.

  Here, there was no life. Nothing but stone.

  I moved swiftly, but slowed when I neared the gates to the outer circle.

  They were open. Occasional patrols passed through them, the guards saluting each other or pausing to talk in low, mumbled voices to the two sentries posted there. The sentries stood to one side of the open arch, but they were relaxed, occasionally speaking to each other. Laughter broke out across the street as I settled into shadow twenty paces away from their position.

  I glanced up to the night sky, toward the slice of the moon and the stars. There were no clouds tonight, nothing to obscure the light.

  I suppressed a sigh and crouched low, grew still.

  I submerged myself, deeper and deeper, until the balance felt right, until I could see into every shadow, see every guardsman’s face as they passed by and the lines of exhaustion and boredom on the sentries’ faces.

  Then I focused, felt the currents alter around me, bend and twist, tighten, so I could see what would happen—

  There.

  I relaxed, shifted where I crouched, and waited. Guards moved, chuckled quietly, slapped their horses’ necks, a steady flow. A few breaks occurred, where no one passed through the gate, but none long enough for me to move, and none where the two sentries were distracted.

  A hundred measured breaths later, a pair of guardsmen disappeared down the street. As the last hoofbeat faded into silence, one of the sentries turned to the other, motioned out toward the city below, away from my position.

  I moved.

  As I slipped into the shadows of the outer ward, the gates behind me, I heard one of the sentries grunt and chuckle, slapping the other on his back. I paused a moment to make certain they hadn’t seen me, then continued on.

  The streets of the outer circle were subtly different. Closer, near the main thoroughfare leading up through the old city’s walls, but then they widened out. As I moved, I found myself settling down into a familiar pattern, one I didn’t recognize at first. But, pausing at a corner, I realized that the tension in my shoulders, in my legs as I balanced on the balls of my feet, came from the Dredge, from Erick.

  I smiled slowly. I was hunting.

  Sliding from darkness to darkness, I came up on Charls’ manse, stared up at the top of the wall above my head. Reaching for familiar handholds, I hefted myself up to the top. I watched the building closely, my heart beating faster in my chest. As soon as I slid down into the garden I’d be in unfamiliar territory. I’d only come to the top of the wall in my previous excursions, watched the house from a distance to get an idea of where Charls’ rooms were, to get a feel for the movements of his servants.

  The manse should have been quiet, but candlelight glowed in a few of the lower windows.

  I hesitated, considered leaving.

  I saw William’s face, eyes closed in sleep, brows furrowed and sweaty.

  I dropped into the garden. The moment my feet hit the ground, the Fire awoke, spreading cold across my chest. I ran across the garden to the house, toward a side door used by the servants to get to the carriage house and stables. I sensed nothing, heard nothing.

  The door opened easily.

  Charls’ manse was similar in layout to Borund’s. I stood in a servants’ entranceway, a narrow door before me. Stairs to my left ascended to the servants’ rooms above. The kitchen stood on the other side of the manse, with another set of servants’ stairs there. The door before me should open onto a long hallway running the length of the house, intercepted only by the large open foyer with the main stairs leading up to the second floor. Rooms opened up on either side.

  I stepped to the inner door, past the stairs, listened, then stepped into the long inner hallway. Two doors down, candlelight spilled out into the hall. I stilled, heart halting, but the hallway remained empty.

  Silently, I edged up to the open doorway, heard voices as I approached.

  “Tarrence has seized all of the available resources in Marlett. It took him longer than expected though, even with Marcus gone. Some of what we expected to find in Marcus’ warehouses had already been purchased by others.”

  “By whom?”

  At the door, I settled down on my heels, one hand on the floor for support. I recognized the first voice as Charls, but didn’t recognize the second. Sliding deeper beneath the river, I stole a glance into the room.

  Four men, seated at a round table in a room like B
orund’s office, but more sparse.

  “Regin, Yvan. And Borund.” Contempt filled Charls’ voice.

  “Borund,” the second man said flatly. He watched Charls carefully as he spoke. He had a long nose, mustache, gray-streaked hair pulled back in a ponytail, vaguely familiar.

  I frowned, then remembered: the merchant with the mustard-colored coat from the guild hall. The one Charls had spoken to at the edge of the room, before Borund had approached him.

  The other two merchants were familiar as well, people Borund spoke to in the hall on a regular basis. Both shared a glance and shifted in their seats, but said nothing.

  I pulled back, contemplated moving back to the servants’ entrance.

  “Yes, Borund,” Charls spat. “He’s become increasingly annoying. If he’d only died that night in the tavern. Or at least during the ambush in the middle ward.”

  “But he didn’t,” the other merchant continued. “In fact, since that night, the other merchants have begun hiring their own bodyguards. And Borund has increased his purchases of essentials like grain and salt and fish, storing them in the warehouses here in Amenkor rather than shipping them out to the other cities. This is why he was to be eliminated in the first place.”

  “He’s proving harder to get rid of than expected.”

  “Obviously.”

  I heard someone shift forward, his chair creaking.

  In a much softer voice, the unknown merchant said, “In order for this to work, in order for us to gain and keep control of the city, our little group must be the only ones in the city with vital goods to sell. If we cannot get our hands on what Borund has stored away . . .”

  He let the sentence trail off and I heard him shift again.

  After a long silence, Charls said, “I’ll take care of Borund . . . and his bodyguard.”

  A cold shiver of fear coursed through me, tinged with anger. Charls wasn’t going to let it go.