The Assassin Princess (Lamb & Castle Book 2)

by J M Sanford

  The thundering horses came to a halt close by. Meg didn't need to see them to know that there would be two, or to know who their riders would be: two smart gentlemen with black eyes and stone hearts.

  The two horses came to a halt outside the cave, where Bryn still lay. The Argean cowered, caught out in the open this time, too sick to run. He growled at them instead, setting his ears back.

  “State your allegiance!” one of the gentlemen demanded. “Do you serve a Queen?”

  Bryn only cringed and bared his fangs. Master Greyfell reached for his sword, but before he'd even half-drawn the blade, Meg flicked out her bejewelled fingers and stuck him fast to the rocks where he crouched. As an afterthought she stole his voice, too, just to be on the safe side. She glanced at Harold and Percival, daring them to move and get a taste of the same spell. For as long as the two gentlemen didn't recognise Bryn as a member of the Black Queen's party, he should be safe. At least Bryn wasn't so foolish as to challenge the golems to a duel; now just to hope that he would have the sense not to reveal the presence of his companions.

  The first gentleman turned to the second. “Can it not speak?” he asked.

  “Perhaps not,” said the second, looking just as puzzled by the Argean. “We've seen such creatures before, don't you agree?”

  His twin nodded, but didn’t look very sure of it. “Whatever this creature is, it wears no insignia and is likely no part of the Queens' Contest –”

  “– but perhaps it knows the whereabouts of the construct we seek.” They turned back to Bryn. “Excuse me, good… sir or madam, but have you seen a large construct running wild across these moors?” And when Bryn continued to growl and show his fangs despite the fact he could barely move, the gentleman pressed on: “The construct we seek has many dangerous faults in its design, and must be repaired or dismantled, post haste.”

  “Prince Archalthus will almost certainly order it dismantled this time,” said his twin.

  The two golems looked at each other a long while, and who knew what thoughts passed between their identical minds in silence. “Very well, then,” said one of them at last, “let us leave the poor sickly wretch alone. Good day to you, sir or madam!” And the two of them cantered off.

  Only once she was certain the two were out of sight and out of earshot did Meg release Master Greyfell from her enchantment. He slammed his sword back into its sheath as if he wished the sword were plunging into her heart.

  “I know, I know,” she said. “Using magic against the magically incompetent is against the rules of the contest.”

  “And you didn't think to use such cheap trickery against the prince's men?” Master Greyfell demanded.

  “What, the golems?” Meg laughed scornfully. As if she hadn't tried! Spells of that nature depended on finagling with a body's free will, but if those dreadful stone creatures had even a scrap of free will about them, she hadn't had the time to winkle it out. “Those spells only work on the feeble-minded,” she said instead, enjoying the look on his face when he had no way to refute that. She'd never tell him that he'd fought her spell impressively hard, for an ordinary man. Instead she went out to where Bryn still sprawled, miserable and whining. She stroked his forehead and cast a spell that was really meant for calming ewes in difficult labour, but seemed to work well enough on him.

  “Them golem things…” said Harold, uncertainly, “Were they the same ones from Ilamira?” He'd fought those very same golems on their journey to the jade temple, and he too had only come out of the fight unscathed thanks to Meg's intervention.

  “Perhaps,” said Meg. As far as she could tell, they were identical, so there might be two of them, or there might be two hundred. The prince could well have set his captive Archmage to the task of building and ensouling an army of soldiers, all alike in strength, skill and stamina, and the Archmage had been worked to the point of exhaustion, so Meg was leaning towards a larger number than two, certainly.

  “At least they seem to prefer pursuing that enormous construct now,” said Sir Percival.

  Meg sat down, chewing her thumbnail. At Ilamira, the golems had been sent to capture the White Queen alive. After escaping the jade temple, Amelia had sworn they tried to kill her. Meg knew little of the illegal magic used to construct and animate golems. She supposed their scripts could have been rewritten; their instructions changed. Certainly the two horsemen had seemed intent on their tedious task of chasing the giant around in circles ever since it had landed. Still, safest to assume that each one of those fancy gentlemen was more dangerous than a tiger.

  “You must admire their horsemanship,” Sir Percival was saying.

  “Excellent posture,” Master Greyfell agreed. “Excellent control.”

  Meg declined to comment. She'd seen the effect Argeans had on horses before, and any normal horse would have either bolted at the first whiff of Bryn’s scent, or kicked his head clear off his shoulders. It had struck her before that there had been something out of the ordinary about the gentlemen's horses. Perhaps those handsome dappled creatures were more constructs like their riders, or perhaps talking horses of the days of old, though if they were the latter, they'd been tight-lipped so far. Stranger than the horses, though, the riders hadn't known what to make of the Argean. True, the majority of Argeans never left home to explore the world of men, but most people at least knew what they were, if they hadn't yet seen one. Even Harold, born and raised in a little town in the back end of nowhere, had only wanted confirmation that the exotic creature was what he'd heard of in rumours, whereas the golem gentlemen had no idea at all what they'd been looking at. Meg wondered what to think of the odd gap in their knowledge, and how she might be able to make use of it.

  She half-listened as Sir Percival and Master Greyfell compared notes on the strange creatures they'd come across along the way: the prying clockwork dragonette; some terrible birds with wings like sabres; the melancholy lumbering giant that had fallen to earth. And, at length, they came back to the matter of the tireless golem gentlemen.

  “I've seen four of them now,” said Master Greyfell. “The two on horseback, and two similar gentlemen in Iletia, who were fair-haired. I suspect they always operate in pairs, and moreover that one cannot live without his twin.”

  “When you hurt one of them bad enough, they freeze, and the other one freezes too,” put in Harold. He didn’t like it to be forgotten that he'd battled the strange gentlemen himself, which was more than Sir Percival had done. But his comment proved controversial: Master Greyfell maintained that no such thing happened in his experience, and he didn't like to be defied by a common butcher's boy from a town of no repute.

  “I've seen it myself,” said Sir Percival, in his apprentice's defence. But that reminds me…” He turned to Meg. “Do you remember, back in that teahouse near Springhaven, when we first saw those strange twins and overheard some of their conversation? One of them said something about a defective script. And just now they spoke of the likelihood of the construct being broken down if the prince learned of the flaws in its design…” Just for a moment, they'd almost sounded like they cared. “If we can capture one of them, perhaps we can lean on any natural impulse towards self-preservation that they may have,” suggested Percival. “If they're the pair from the teahouse, one of them is defective. And if they don't care for themselves at all, Master Greyfell and I suspect they may care more for their doubles. If we can gain their cooperation, there's a lot we might learn from them.”

  Meg doubted this plan would bear fruit: she too had had time to think about the nature of the strange gentlemen. Though they took the shape of men, in spirit they were nothing more than hounds set to follow a trail, and she wouldn't be surprised to find that the souls inside those artificial bodies were those of real dogs. The golems' loyalty was written in stone, and whatever orders they had they would follow to the death… but they were scarcely imaginative, and might not suspect that Black Side and White Side would ever work together. Capturing one of them would likely pro
ve to be the easier half of Percival's plan.

  20: AN UNGENTLEMANLY PLAN

  “Stand back!” shouted Master Greyfell, his voice ringing across the empty bowl of grey rock and yellow-green grass. Meg didn't need telling twice, and Sir Percival had already retreated to a more than safe distance, but Meg made sure to keep a close eye on Harold while Bryn set down his precious puzzle box in the grass and hobbled away from it to join the others. Then, apparently without a word or signal from Bryn, the sides of the puzzle box began to unfold. The pieces unfurled like a flower as seen through the eyes of a slow-minded dryad, but they didn't stop when they should have. Instead, the puzzle continued to unfold, growing larger and larger, until it was completely impossible that all that should have been inside a box no larger than a tea caddy. The low sun of an autumn morning shone on mahogany and bright brass, and the puzzle box grew to the size of a house: restlessly, continuously seeking its rightful shape. Just for a moment, Meg could have sworn she saw the thing flash through a shape that showed enormous ivory fangs, each as long as a man's leg. Just as she was trying to make up her mind if she'd seen what she thought she'd seen, and perhaps more importantly if anybody else had seen it, long dark planks curved up like great wings, and the unfolding mahogany and yellow monstrosity settled swan-like into the form of an elegant skyship. Sharvesh's sails unfurled in the sun like liquid gold running down from her yards.

  “Isn't she the finest thing you've ever seen?” said Bryn. He'd lurched dizzily from landsick to a kind of lovesick, and Meg regarded him with new suspicion. Sharvesh was no ordinary skyship, not even by Argean standards.

  What do you have here and how did you get hold of it? Meg thought to herself. But “Very nice, dear,” was what she said aloud. “Comes in handy, I've no doubt.” A warship – a real one. Sharvesh, despite her current gaudy outfitting, had been made for manoeuvres completely impossible for any other skyship, and not even the Argeans could build a skyship that could fold itself up small enough to fit in your pocket. She'd have to find out where Bryn had got it from… But not just now. Leaving Percival and Harold behind as lookouts, she boarded the exotic skyship with Bryn and Master Greyfell. She noted with interest what the folded skyship had held and that they now retrieved: food, coils of rope, Master Greyfell's crossbow, all whole and unharmed. She doubted anything living could survive the dreadful, impossible folding and unfolding between the alien skyship's many forms. Sharvesh certainly showed no sign of mice, but then, her captain was to all intents and purposes an enormous cat, so Meg was ashamed to say she'd jumped to the wrong conclusion at first.

  Once they had what they needed and all stood at a safe distance, Sharvesh folded neatly back into a puzzle box. Meg watched the transformation keenly, trying in vain to see how the trick was done; looking for clues as to Sharvesh's origins and the nature of the magic that ruled her. Meg's own snailcastletank was one of a kind, but that was no more than an oddity, a joke to many who saw it trundling across the countryside. The snailcastletank had been a gift from a friend, and it was no kind of weapon. She'd named it the White Queen's Warship to poke fun at the whole ridiculous contest as much as anything else. But the title had stuck, and so they'd had to drag poor Tallulah along with them into the fight, with a horrible shrinking spell on the innocent snail. After all the years that Meg had been hiding away, no braver than Amelia, she'd forgotten to take the dangers seriously.

  She looked round to see Master Greyfell watching her. She swore he enjoyed inflicting the new mystery of the strange skyship on her and her curiosity. She had half a mind to show him some mysteries, and see how he liked it… But for now, Perce had come up with some far-fetched plan to capture a golem, and when it came to the art of war Perce always envisioned himself commanding vast armies that swept nations, so as usual she'd had to come up with the details of the plan herself. “Right then,” she said, and pointed to Master Greyfell's crossbow. “How far can you shoot that thing and hit a man?”

  ~

  Master Greyfell hadn’t much liked Meg's plan, and neither had Sir Percival. Even against immortal inhuman enemies, honour drove them to fight by certain rules. Harold, much as he aspired to knighthood, found himself thinking this a bit daft, and scowled, wondering if he'd spent too much time with the witch. He and Sir Percival had set out to track down the twin gentlemen, armed with no more than their swords, and the lamb of the White Queen, shining white on his breastplate, felt like a bullseye painted across his heart as he looked up at the gravelly slopes of the valley they walked through. Meg could make herself invisible by magic. The Black Paladin had other methods of concealment…

  “There they are,” said Sir Percival, lifting one gleaming gauntlet to point out the figures of two horsemen further down the valley, the horses bending their necks to drink from the stream. “Now I'll show you how to begin a proper duel.”

  But the two dark-haired gentlemen had drawn from their previous painful experiences that there would be no honourable duel from the White Side, and the horses broke into a gallop, thundering across the turf as the dark riders unsheathed their swords. Without a word or a shout, they bore down on Percival and Harold, clearly meaning to strike their enemies dead without delay and be done with them once and for all. The first crack of unearthly lightning across the valley missed the golems entirely. Harold was slow to draw his own sword and instead threw himself flat to miss the blade sweeping towards his neck. He scrambled away from the hooves that flew like great hammers, clods of wet earth and grass flying in the wake of the horses. A second bolt of lightning flashed from the hillside, closer this time but still a miss. What was Meg doing? He heard a cry – the other horseman had knocked Percival down, though either the blow had been a clumsy one or it had glanced off the knight's plate armour. Now the horse reared, a warhorse trained to stomp infantrymen into the mud… and then it stopped, suddenly become a stone statue of a horse, fine grey-veined marble, a crossbow bolt buried deep in its thick arching neck. So, Master Greyfell had a good position on the hillside, even if Meg didn't… Percival scrabbled back across the muddy ground just in time as the golem horse came back to life, front hooves driving into the soft ground where he'd lain moments before. The two horsemen had driven Harold and Percival back onto muddier ground, soaked with the rain of the past few weeks and churned by the passage of cattle. Neither man nor beast had a steady footing here, and the horses had far more weight with which to concern themselves.

  Harold gripped the hilt of his sword tightly in both hands, but even as he readied himself, a second bolt thudded home in the chest of the second horse, which halted as if baulking at a jump, throwing its rider over its head and into the mud. With a ripple and a shiver, stone turned back to muscle and horsehair. Meanwhile the other horse had stumbled forward into a patch of thorns and white flowers, sending glowing yellow seeds billowing up around it. The seeds caught burr-like in the horse's coat, where they grew to bright wires of light that danced around horse and rider, wriggling across the horse's flanks, catching and tangling in its mane where they writhed and bit, flailing and snapping their tails. Alive and stung, the golem horse tossed its head, snorting and prancing back from this unexpected attack, heedless of its rider's commands. The stench of burning horsehair hung in the air, mixed with scorched stone. No matter how the horse turned and twisted, leapt and bucked, the incandescent worms plagued it, two dozen of them at least. All its rider could do was to hang on as his horse, driven mad by the worms of light, galloped away.

  The second horse was picking its way through the marshy ground to rescue its own rider, but before it could reach him, Meg came hurrying down the hillside, skidding on the scree, fists balled as she began to mutter a spell – low, droning, heavy.

  Harold didn't want the remaining golem to guess the source of the lightning without thunder and the vicious wormlights. “Oi, you!” he shouted at the unhorsed twin, “I remember you!” From Ilamira, where the strange gentlemen had been ready to dismiss him as a worthless distraction. And all around th
e strange gentleman, the mud began to bubble and heave…

  Ignoring the witch, the gentleman lunged towards Harold, ungainly as he sank up to his knees in churned black mud that grew wetter and more treacherous instant by instant. “The White Paladin. Yes, of course. We must be rid of you.” The mud sucked his shoes at every laboured step, and he'd lost his sword, but by the fire of determination in his black eyes, he'd take some satisfaction in killing Harold with his bare hands.

  “Get hold of him!” shouted Meg. “Get hold of him and let's get him away from here before the other one comes back!”

  Unarmed and up to his knees in mud, the golem seemed no stronger than a man, and his inbuilt defence against blades and projectiles was of little use when all Harold intended was to peacefully restrain him. Harold wrestled the golem under control easily enough, and tied his hands behind his back. Master Greyfell and Sir Percival had harder work pulling Harold and the captive golem free of the mud, while Meg sat on the grass and watched, still breathless from her own exertion.

  “You are the White Paladin,” the golem said again to Harold. “Where is the White Queen?” he demanded, and then proved himself to be one of a pair they'd met before: a hint of alarm crept into his expression as he recognised Meg. “The snail mistress!”

  “That's the White Mage, thank you very much,” said Meg. “Look at the state of you,” she laughed. The golem's fancy clothes were covered in black mud and bits of grass.