The Warlord's Domain

by Peter Morwood

  "Hanar," said Aymar Dacurre, "you are my grandson."

  Hanar Santon started very slightly at that. He had known it all his life, but had never heard it spoken aloud except by his mother, Dacurre's second daughter: The explanation for the silence had involved such words as "favoritism" and "respect" and, most of all, "honor," so he had never pursued the matter. To hear it now from the old man himself was something of a shock, for they had moved to first-name terms only in the past ten days or so.

  "My grandson indeed," the old man continued, "by an excellent and honorable father. And despite the difference in our ages, my friend. But, Hanar, you are also sometimes such an innocent that I despair of your ever seeing sense."

  Santon blinked and licked his lips. He didn't know where this might be leading, but in the company of a fire-eater notorious through three generations of Alban nobility he was ready for the worst. "Sir?" he ventured finally and braced himself for whatever blast he might have provoked. There was none.

  "All this talk about high-clan-lords. When you have some free time again"—and Aymar laughed both at the thought of free time and at the expression on young Santon's face, since free time for either of them was less likely than honesty in Imperial politics—"you should go back to your histories and read for yourself how much grief those who style themselves ilauem-arlethen have caused down the years. Enough, and more than enough. But first, and now, read this."

  The Court Archive skidded down the table and came to a stop almost exactly where Aymar had intended that it should, in front of the younger man. That its passage upset Hanar's painstakingly sorted sheaf of notes and reports bothered him not a whit; there would be plenty more of those before the day's work was done and locked away from prying eyes.

  "Read it?" The archive was a good handspan thick, for all that its leaves were thin and the writing on them small. "You mean, now?"

  "Not all of it, boy. Just look at the pages I marked; you should find them of interest." Aymar drew across another bundle of papers and inked his writing-brush with care, then glanced at Hanar from beneath his fierce white eyebrows. "But read them carefully. You may well learn more than your tutors ever taught you…"

  "Feeling better now?"

  Chin-deep in the hot bath-water, Aldric stirred a little but made no reply other than a faint sigh of contentment. Eyes closed, with a pillow of rolled toweling behind his head, he both looked and sounded asleep.

  Kyrin wrapped a warmed towel around herself—there were plenty more draped over a rack in front of the fire—and padded across the room to look down at him, telling herself that she was only making sure whether he was indeed asleep or just very relaxed, and that he was in no danger of slipping so far down into the tub that he might inhale some of the water. For all that, the making sure took several minutes of close study rather than the cursory glance it might otherwise have required. "You've lost too much weight with worrying about things that you can't help, my love," she said quietly in her own language, and then smiled. "But you're still good to look at. Very good indeed."

  Whatever opinion Aldric might have expressed, the loss of weight was true enough and beyond argument. His face was leaner than it should have been, and the body which in her memory was broad-shouldered, square and strong was now an incomplete sketch of that remembered image, with all the big muscles defined like a surgical anatomy and ribs and pelvis stark under skin which lay too close to the bone.

  "You need to stop all this errand-running," Kyrin said. She spoke in Alban now, still reluctant to disturb him and yet half-hoping he was awake enough to listen.

  "You need to stop concerning yourself with all the troubles of the world and find yourself some peace instead." She turned away and shook her head sadly. "I just wish the world's troubles would leave you alone to do it."

  "Do what?" Aldric's voice was lazy, an effect of the vast heat of the water, but lacked the dullness of someone recently asleep.

  Kyrin looked at him and raised one eyebrow. "Oh— so you weren't asleep at all."

  "I wouldn't dignify it by calling it sleep." He raised one hand to rake back damp hair from his eyes, very slowly and carefully since in water so deep and hot a sudden movement might cause a spill and would certainly cause discomfort. "But I wasn't much awake either. What were you saying?"

  "Nothing much."

  Aldric gave her back the raised eyebrow—now his own were visible—and added a little to the delivery. "You never let me get away with a response like that, so why should I let you? Tell me about nothing much."

  Kyrin exchanged her damp, cool towel for a fresh one, warm and dry, and told him just how very much the nothing much involved. "And neither of us knows," she finished, with anger starting to edge her words, "who those assassins were, or why they came looking, or who sent them. But they tried to kill you all the same!"

  "They tried to kill you as well."

  "Just because I was in the way, or with you, or a witness."

  "Quite. And whose fault is that?"

  "Oh, damn you!" Her anger flared and faded like the plume of sparks that billowed up the chimney as a log collapsed in the grate. "If I thought you nitpicked for any reason other than to tease me, I'd… I'd…"

  "Drown me in the bath-tub?"

  "And maybe I will yet." Kyrin glanced at Aldric as he climbed from the water. "We stay here tonight. What about tomorrow?"

  "Another inn, closer to Drakkesborg." He lifted one of the towels and scrubbed at his hair for a few seconds before elaborating a little. "I'm in no hurry to get there."

  "Then why go at all? Why not go home to Alba?"

  Aldric raised both his eyebrows. 'The old song, eh? Yet you were the one who said they knew the whys and wherefores of my going."

  Kyrin shrugged and smiled faintly. "A girl has to try these things every now and then."

  "You don't like Drakkesborg?"

  "I've never been to it. I'll go there with you, but… but I don't like the sound of the place."

  "I do. Imperial Drakkesborg, the City of the Dragon. But with a name like that, I'm biased anyway. And the place does have a few good things about it—theaters, for one." He hitched at the towel wrapped around his waist which was trying to slide floorwards, draped another capewise across one shoulder and an outstretched arm, then cleared his throat in a portentous sort of way and assumed a dramatic pose.

  "It pleases me to see the joyful season that is Autumn." he declaimed, rolling the words around his mouth like plum-stones:

  For it swells the fruit upon the trees

  And makes the harvest rich and tall

  And it pleases me to hear the song of the birds

  Who make their mirth resound through all the woods.

  And it pleases me to hear the song of silver trumpets.

  And it pleases me to see upon the meadows

  Tents and pavilions planted.

  And the flowers of silken banners

  And the raiment of fair ladies.

  And it pleases me to see ranged along the field

  Bold men and horses standing tall

  Come from afar to make pretense of war …

  Then the more important of the two towels gave up its struggle to hold on to Aldric's hips and slithered to the floor despite his frantic clutch, and Kyrin dissolved in helpless giggles. "Oren Osmar's Tiluan the Prince," he explained care-fully, trying to keep his face straight. "It's not really like that. At least, not exactly…"

  "Nothing else at all?"

  "Nothing, my lord."

  "Very well." Lord Dacurre looked tired and far older even than his seventy-three years. "You may go. Dismissed."

  The trooper saluted crisply—more crisply than he had done before the dead king, and with more respect— then snapped around and walked from the room. Dacurre watched him go. "I appreciate the lasting peace," he said quietly, "but I could almost wish that something would happen. With my fellow lords, or even with the Drusalan Warlord. Anything. Just so that I could do something about it, rather t
han sit here and do nothing at all."

  "You're doing far more than you need, just sitting here." Hanar Santon had sat quietly while the soldier handed over his written report and delivered the verbal observations that went with it. Dacurre—and through his example, Santon—placed considerable value on what was thought and said, the kind of information that seldom passed from a man's mind on to paper, no matter how much of his inmost thoughts he might have tried to write. It was listening to what was said and what was felt that was of real use. Both men had often wished there was some way to glean the same knowledge from within the Drusalan Empire as they were able to obtain from inside the walls of Alba's citadels. "Tell me, Aymar," Santon glanced casually at the new report, then set it aside and stared at the old man, "how much sleep have you been getting?"

  "Enough." Even as he said the word, Dacurre knew that he was wasting his breath. Hanar Santon was no more a fool than anyone else who had seen him today, and Aymar knew that trying to deceive the young man was pointless—especially since he had managed perhaps eight hours of sleep in the past seventy, and it showed.

  "Of course. Then the reason you fall asleep in your chair must be other than weariness."

  "Yes; you're forgetting about boredom." Both men grimaced at the joke which had long ceased to be funny. The luxury of enough idleness to feel bored was something they had both forgotten in the days since the king was killed.

  "Boredom?" It was the standard response, but spoken now in the dull voice of a man exhausted. "What's that?"

  "It's like sleep, except you don't close your eyes."

  "Oh. Mythic vice." Santon smiled wanly and flipped open the report again, staring at the neat script as if it no longer made any sense. He shook his head like a man walking into a cobweb. "What day is it now?"

  One look told Aymar that this was not another joke but a real and rather desperate attempt to regain a faltering hold on reality. "Sixteenth of the twelfth."

  Kevhardu tlai'seij, de Merwin, in the formal reckoning. Rynert had been dead twenty-one days now. A lifetime. Long enough for a country to begin to die, except that the threat against its life had done nothing. And neither Dacurre nor Santon could understand the reason why. The old man stretched, trying to ease kinks in his spine which hadn't been there three weeks ago. He wasn't meant to hunch over a deskful of paperwork all day; neither of them was. But with no one else in Cerdor willing or able to do the work, somebody had to. Dacurre wished it didn't have to be him.

  The knock on the Council-chamber door brought both men out of their private thoughts with a perceptible jerk, even though neither would have admitted to being startled. Whoever was outside, it was not the usual chamberlain with his diffident rapping, not unless the man had managed to get drunk in the few minutes since he had ushered in the cavalry trooper. This wasn't a polite single knuckle but a pounding fist, and Lord Dacurre knew urgency when he heard it. Caution and the memory of Rynert laid one hand on his taipan shortsword, twisting the weapon's safety-collar from the scabbard, before he glanced at Hanar Santon and gave the command to "Enter!"

  Both of the big doors were pulled open and seven guardsmen piled into the room with weapons drawn. Their cutting-spears made the spokes of a wheel whose hub, a handspan from each of the encircling blades, was a slim man who wore ragged gray and a tightly-buckled constabulary restraint-harness which dragged his crossed wrists up his back and almost between his shoulder blades. Once his garments might have been a close-fitting suit with gloves, boots and hood all uniform with the tunic and breeches, but now he was clothed more in bruises and tatters than anything else. The guards had plainly borne King Rynert's fate in mind, and had been zealous both in their arrest and the subsequent search-and-subdue procedure.

  "Well!" Dacurre covered his astonishment with a monosyllabic exclamation which might have been amusement, or interest, or recognition of a familiar outline. "We would have met before, except that I recall you were in rather a hurry to leave. I think we can chat more comfortably this time, don't you?"

  Aymar Dacurre had all the detestations of any high-clan conservative for the tulathin mercenaries, and added to that a loathing of this particular specimen of the breed if—and Aymar had no reason so far to doubt it—the battered figure before him was the root source of all Alba's present troubles. "You should not have come back."

  "Let me, gran—, my lord!" Santon was on his feet, equanimity and silence washed away by anger. "I owe this thing for all the dirt clinging to my name and to my Honor. Let me deal with him myself."

  "Hanar, be quiet. You sound like Talvalin." Dacurre's soft-spoken warning was more than most men were permitted, and Santon knew it. He subsided back into his seat, glowering and drumming his fingers on the sheathed taipan on the table in front of him but saying nothing else aloud.

  Dacurre inspected the small bag laid on the table before him by the sergeant commanding squad. It contained the results of a stringent body search: small, flat knives, a garrotting-cord, various lock-picks—and a tiny vial of thin glass which the old clan-lord rolled to and fro between finger and thumb, watching the heavy, oily movement of the fluid sealed inside. Then he stared at the taulath. "You are already a dead man. And the law says this: the manner of your passing is in my hands and not," Dacurre set the poison-vial carefully aside, "by your own choice."

  "Yes, old man, I know the formula." The mercenary grinned without humor. "I should have had that… choice tucked in my cheek where it belonged, and where your soldiers hit me. There would then have been no need for threats and such unpleasantness. But I'd as soon die an easy death as a hard one. So—what do you want to know?"

  For a moment Lord Dacurre ignored the insolence and turned his attention instead of the guards. "You two, bring a heavy chair and secure him in it. You, get one of the Archive clerks. You, call the steward; have him bring wine and food. You others, watch this reptile; if he moves, cripple him." Dacurre settled back, satisfied that at long last there was activity of a sort, then glared at the guardsman ordered to fetch food who had reappeared in the doorway and looked confused. "Yes, what?"

  "My lord, the steward wants to know for how many?"

  "Two, man! Two—and as many of your guardsmen as feel dry or hungry. I'll want your names afterward—to mention favorably when I report this to your commander."

  "And what about me?" asked the taulath.

  Dacurre stared at him, as a cat might stare at a mouse giving cheek from under the paw that caught it. Then he smiled, and not the studied smile of cruelty but something strangely tolerant for a man so capable of anger. "Why not? For sheer nerve alone. All right, guard, get on with it."

  "He was captured in the Hall of Kings, my lord. And he was limping before we touched him." The sergeant-of-Guards sounded just a little defensive about the state of their prisoner; that sort of mistreatment was usually the prerogative of the Drusalan Secret Police. "Otherwise we couldn't have taken him. He's a skilled fighter, for all he's one of them."

  "Do I hear admiration, sergeant?" asked the taulath with an annoyingly arch smile. The soldier glanced sidelong at his prisoner and disdained to reply.

  "All right," said Hanar Santon, "enough of this. Never mind whether you admire him or not, sergeant; I presume his… present condition is a result of that so-admirable skill."

  "Yes, my lord. Taking him alive was harder than killing him, but after what happened I thought you and my Lord Dacurre would want information rather than a corpse."

  "Commended, sergeant." Santon sipped at a cup of wine and stared at the taulath. "Your prisoner, Aymar. I still want to kill the bastard."

  "Patience. Now, you." Dacurre returned his full attention to the man strapped in the chair. ".What name do we call you?"

  "Call me Keythar," said the taulath. "In the Drusalan language it means—"

  "Fox. Yes, I know that. And it isn't your name at all, is it?"

  "Of course not." The man called Fox smiled slightly. "But that hardly matters, does it?"

  "No."
Dacurre mirrored the smile exactly. "I suppose not. But from your accent you're as Alban as I am—and I'll not speak Drusalan unless I have to, Fox."

  The taulath shrugged indifferently. "It's a label, nothing more. I stopped caring about such niceties years ago."

  "A pity you are what you are; there must have been some good in you once."

  "Do I hear admiration, Lord Dacurre?" asked Hanar Santon quietly.

  Dacurre looked at the younger man. "No. Regret. You'll recognize it when you're as old as I am. Now, Fox, why did you come back to the Hall of Kings when you must have known the king was dead?"

  "Well, that's the question, isn't it? Who says he's dead except those who benefit?"

  This was a response that startled not only the two clan-lords but the guardsmen as well, soldiers whose duties required them to overhear many things and react to none of them. Some of these soldiers, however, had seen the ripped corpse carried from the hall three weeks before, and the discovery that a taulath—one of those renowned for knowing secrets—was ignorant of just how dead a disemboweled man could be, came as a surprise.

  "You really don't know?"

  It might have been the tone or the wording of Dacurre's response that brought it home, but all the muscles of Fox's face twisted as he realized just how wrong he had been. "Ah. And I thought that the tales were spread as part of some subtle scheme to provoke unsteady clan-lords into rash action… or something like that." He laughed harshly, at himself as much as at the discovery of his mistake. "It would seem, Lord Aymar Dacurre, that old-fashioned directness is something my people must learn to consider all over again. I, they, all of us were thinking in curves and spirals; thinking in straight lines is unfashionable in modern politics."