by Moore, John
“Oh no.”
“Yes. This is very expensive cloth.”
“They caught him.”
He was looking past her, out the window, at the central tower. Catherine followed his gaze, just in time to see a bird fly off the tower and a hooded figure disappear back inside. “Who was that?”
The prince grabbed her arm. “I’ll show you.”
When they want to be charming, no one can be as charming as old men. They have had decades to learn what other people, deep inside, really care about, and they have had time to develop the skill of reading other people’s expressions and interpreting the subtle nuances of voice and gesture. Charming old men know just what to say to make you feel good about yourself.
But the same advantages of knowledge and experience give sinister old men the ability to be really, really sinister. The ambiance of a dark stairway, a stone tower, and a setting sun added to the menace. And even if Pollocks was not intimidated by the mere atmosphere, Packard and Gregory were also backed up by a half dozen unsmiling guards. Even Oratorio, normally a friendly young man, was looking at Pollocks in a stern and unforgiving manner.
“And to think we trusted you,” said Packard, which is what people always say when they catch a spy. Of course, most people don’t get much opportunity to catch a spy, so it’s not like the phrase gets worn out from overuse. “You’ve betrayed us to Fortescue, haven’t you?”
“No, my lords! Never.” From the start, Pollocks had mentally conditioned himself for the possibility of being caught, and had prepared brave and witty answers to every anticipated question. But now he was in the grip of two guards, each holding him so tightly that agonizing pains were shooting up his arms and into his neck. It was difficult to maintain any semblance of cool.
“Who else could it be?” Gregory asked Packard. “Is Fortescue going to double-cross us?” He looked at Pollocks. “What did he tell you?”
“Nothing! I don’t know anything about Fortescue!”
“Who is getting the message?”
“No one. I mean—um—it was . . . my recipe club. You see, every month you send out a recipe to your friends—this one was for amaretto cheesecake—and they send one back to you and—aiieee!” He ended with a screech as one of the guards holding him twisted his arm up behind his back. Oratorio frowned and motioned for the guard to ease up.
“Of course, it could be merely routine intelligence gathering by Fortescue’s army,” said Packard. “I’m sure he doesn’t trust us any more than we trust him. It doesn’t mean he’s going to double-cross us.”
“We’ll find out,” said Gregory. “We’ve got time. We’ll make him talk.” He looked at Pollocks and the most sinister part about it was that he wasn’t even trying to be sinister. He was simply telling the truth. “You’ll tell us everything you know. About the king, the WMD, Thessalonius, Charlie, Fortescue, all of it. If you have any secrets to betray, you’ll betray them. You know that’s true. After a few hours, you’ll be begging to be allowed to tell us. Although you may linger on in pain for a few days after we’re through with you.”
“No,” whispered Pollocks.
“Take him to the dungeons,” Packard told Oratorio. “To the Star Chamber.” Oratorio looked distinctly unhappy now, but he nodded to the two guards.
They didn’t get far. From below there came the sound of a heavy door crashing open, the scrabbling of footsteps on stairs, and the prince rose into view, dragging Catherine behind him. He took one quick look at his uncles, the guards, and the restrained retainer and figured out the situation at once. “You!” he said to Pollocks. “A spy!”
“No!”
The prince let go of Catherine, who fell to the stairs, rubbing her wrist. He advanced on Pollocks with his fists clenched. “And to think I trusted you!”
“We said that already,” interrupted Packard. “However, we’ll make him tell us . . .”
“You betrayed me!” screamed Charlie. He sprang at Pollocks, shoving him up against the wall. There was a silvery flash of steel in lamplight, and the dagger was out of Charlie’s belt and in Pollocks’s chest.
The two guards let go of his arms and stepped back. Pollocks looked down in shocked surprise, at the red stain that was spreading across his shirt, at the haft of the knife that was still in Charlie’s hand. His eyes rose to meet Charlie’s. Then the prince pulled the knife back and Pollocks’s eyes rolled back in his head. He sagged against the prince. Charlie dragged him across the landing and thrust him into Oratorio’s arms. “Get rid of him,” he said. “Throw the body on a dung heap. No burial for traitors.” He stuck the dagger back in his belt and turned away.
Oratorio glared at his back. But he said nothing, merely hoisted Pollocks carefully over his shoulder and walked down the stairs. Two guards followed him. Charlie turned to Catherine. She cringed under his glare and pressed herself against the wall.
“Really, Your Highness, that was most unwise,” said Gregory. “Pollocks could have given us much useful information.”
“Never mind. We don’t need it.” Charlie was still glaring at Catherine. “Just answer one question for me. Were you aware that our Lady Catherine Durace here is betrothed to General Fortescue? And has been for many months?”
“What?” said Gregory.
“Catherine?” said Packard
“That’s what I thought.” Charlie looked the rest of the guards over, then jerked his head toward the frightened girl. “Take her away. Lock her up.”
Two of the remaining guards went to Catherine’s side and gently lifted her to her feet. The other two took up positions to the front and rear. The entire group moved slowly down the stairs and to the exit door. Catherine turned her head, to cast a look of defiance at the prince.
“No,” said Charlie. The soldiers stopped. “Not back to the tower.” The prince spoke with his lips curled back from clenched teeth. “Take her to the Barsteel.”
“How could this have happened?” moaned Packard. He was sitting in their usual conference room with his hands in his hair. They had been having individual meetings with the kingdom’s nobility, making sure everyone was in line with the program, and the table was now covered with an array of empty bottles—port for the conservatives, claret for the liberals. “We worried that Charlie might double-cross us and we were keeping an eye on him. We worried that Fortescue might double-cross us and we planned for that contingency. We feared that Thessalonius might turn up, or the king’s ghost might give us away, and we allowed for that. But Catherine? She seemed so—I don’t know—so agreeable.”
“Smarter men than ourselves have been fooled by less clever women than our Miss Durace,” said Gregory, calmly raising his glass to the candle and swirling the claret. He tasted it with approval. “Don’t blame yourself because you can’t understand one of them. Their minds operate on a completely different level than ours.”
“She’s engaged to Fortescue. She’s planning to become queen of Noile and Damask. Do you understand where that leaves us? She played us for fools! How can you be so calm?”
“Because if she wasn’t good enough to fool us, she wouldn’t have been good enough to fool Charlie.”
“She didn’t fool him. He found out.”
“And he put her in prison. Relax, Packy. Nothing has changed. Have some of this claret. Might as well finish the bottle.” Gregory was feeling confident. Each one of Damask’s lords had begun assembling his troops. Each one had warned that Charlie had to be removed, and if Packard and Gregory could not persuade the prince to leave on his own terms, he would be removed by force. Packard had promised to talk to the young man but didn’t offer much hope. Gregory had warned that the prince regent had his own guard and storming the castle was no simple feat. Casualties could be expected.
Packard accepted the bottle and refilled his own glass. “Dammit, I wish Charlie had not been so hot tempered. I wanted to know what the hell Pollocks was doing.”
“He was carrying messages between Catherine and Fortescue. I
sn’t that obvious? What else could he have been doing? Too bad. We missed a good opportunity there. We could have used him to feed false information to Fortescue.” Gregory leaned back in his chair. “Relax, Packy,” he repeated. “Nothing has changed. Fortescue didn’t intend to let Charlie live. He knows too much. We weren’t planning to let Catherine live. She knows too much. Pollocks, it seems, knew too much also, and Charlie has solved that problem for us. We couldn’t have let him live anyway.”
“I can’t relax, Gregory, and I’ll tell you why. One, Fortescue’s army is right over the border. He’s coming in whether we’re ready for him or not. That means we have no time left to find the WMD.”
“So we fall back on the contingency plan. Take our money and sell out to Fortescue, just like we told Charlie.”
“Right. Which brings me to point number two. We can’t kill Catherine if she’s engaged to Fortescue. He’d hunt us down and flay us alive. So she’ll be his queen and from her point of view, we know too much. What kind of life do you think we’re going to lead? I’ll tell you. Uneasy, uncomfortable, and very, very short.”
“Ah,” said Gregory. He smiled, and put his feet on the table. “We are not going to kill Catherine. Charlie is going to kill Catherine.”
Packard thought this over. “No,” he said, shaking his head. He thought some more. “Yes. I don’t know. You really think he’d do it?”
“No, of course not. He’s still in love with her. He wouldn’t do it even if he wasn’t in love with her. We’ll do it for him. We give the order, but we do it under his seal. He’ll get the blame. Don’t you see how well this works out for us, Packy? Actually, Charlie gave me the idea.”
“To kill Catherine?”
“He suggested that giving an order to execute Lord Gagnot would force young Albemarle Gagnot to attack. Well, we know how the young puppy feels about Lady Catherine. It’s bound to have the same effect. He’ll attack Charlie right away so he can free Catherine. Alas,” Gregory said, without showing real regret, “his attack will come too late to save her. And then, if Gagnot fails to defeat Charlie, Fortescue will finish him off. There is no way he can escape.”
“I hope not. That young man is making me markedly uneasy. This is such a strange turn of events, Gregory. We chose him because he seemed like such a disinterested third party. I mean, he never even tried to make a claim for the throne. He never seemed to want anything, never had any goals. He’d just lay out that ironic coolness that so many of those college kids adopt. I never thought he would stab a man.”
“I guess if you go around pretending to be an evil prince long enough, it starts to get to you.”
“Of course, we’re executing people and we’re not evil.”
“Yes, but that’s different. It’s the greatest good for the greatest number philosophy. We’re not just doing this for ourselves. The Damask population as a whole will be better off when we’re through.”
“You’re right.” Packard picked up the empty bottle and studied the label. “This really is a good claret. Do we have any more of this? We’ll have to be sure to pack it up and take it with us.”
“We won’t need to. I still think we’ll be able to defeat Fortescue.”
“Come on, Gregory. If we haven’t found the WMD by now, we’re not going to. The ghost didn’t tell Charlie anything and it didn’t come back. We guessed wrong. We’d have been better off going with Jason from the start.”
“Impossible. We can hardly kill one of our own.”
“Well, that’s true.”
“And I still think it will turn up.” Gregory rose and yanked on a bellpull, summoning servants to clean the room. “A Weapon of Magical Destruction is, after all, magical. You know how those magical things work. It will turn up at the last minute, just in the nick of time. They always do.”
Catherine suddenly found herself in quarters far different from what she had been used to. The cells of the Barsteel were not designed for comfort, nor did they provide it. They were little more than iron cages—despite the name, only a few had steel bars—with bare stone floors. One tiny window gave a view of a courtyard. It contained a chopping block, so Catherine did not spend a lot of time looking out. (This private courtyard was for the nobility, of course—common criminals were publicly hanged out front.) Even on the brightest days only a small amount of light penetrated the cell, and the dimness within contributed to the atmosphere of gloomy despair. The fact that the opposite cell was occupied by the Marquis de Sadness did not help Catherine’s mood, either, as he was constantly making comments like “Nice dress. It reminds me of something I saw in Illyria two seasons ago,” and “If you’d waited another week you could have gotten those exact same shoes for forty percent off.”
The cells, though plain, were certainly secure. Visitors to Damask often commented on the quality of the public buildings, most of them simple and unadorned, but solidly constructed. That was because they had all been built as public works projects during previous crop failures. You could do a lot with cheap labor. Most of the cages were crowded—the marquis was now sharing a cage with Lord Gagnot and a corrupt city auditor—but, as the only female prisoner, Catherine had a cage to herself. She spent an uncomfortable night on the wooden bench that served as a bed, shaking on the thin wool blanket. It was too hot to sleep under the blanket—the shaking was from fear. By morning, however, she had a better grip on her emotions. “There is nothing to be afraid of,” she told herself. “Charlie’s upset, but he’ll get over it. He’s not really a bad person. That’s why you chose Fortescue over him, after all.” She tried to look on the bright side. She had bathed and dressed shortly before Charlie had her arrested, as she had been planning to receive guests that evening, so her face and clothes were still fairly clean. If she had visitors, at least she would look presentable. And surely she was entitled to some sort of court hearing, wasn’t she? Fortescue’s army was just over the mountain, waiting for their cue to occupy the city. Worst-case scenario: They would be here in a matter of days. She could wait it out. A guard showed up briefly to bring her a cappuccino and biscotti from the coffee shop downstairs. She ignored them, thinking, I’ll be out of here soon enough. I’ll wait for a real breakfast. That was before the guard returned with the executioner.
Catherine had never seen an executioner. She had never attended an execution—watching people being separated from their heads was not her idea of a good time. But she could recognize an executioner when she saw one—he was unmistakable in his garb of a loose black sweatshirt and pants, and a black hood that covered his entire face except for two eyeholes. The cloth covering his mouth was damp. He was not as big as she expected, and instead of an ax he carried a heavy scimitar. He barely looked at her. “Tomorrow,” he said. “His Highness doesn’t want to wait around on this one. Tomorrow, at dawn.”
“Does it have to be at dawn?” complained the guard. “Why do you guys always have to do this so early?” The guard was one of the city soldiers, a new enlistee in the army, not one of the more professional castle guards.
“What does it matter?” asked the executioner sarcastically. “You got a date?”
“As a matter of fact, I do. Tomorrow is Sunday. I’ve got heavy plans for tonight and I figured on sleeping in tomorrow.”
“You got a date? No kidding.”
“A high-class babe, too,” bragged the guard. “One of the ladies at the castle. But, look, it’s summer. Dawn breaks about five A.M. Do you really want to get up that early? I thought that execution-at-dawn business was just a figure of speech.”
“It’s not a figure of speech. You think it’s easy going around in this black stuff all day.” The executioner grabbed the front of his sweatshirt and flapped the cloth. “Especially in the summer. Once the sun comes up, this hood really gets hot. Let’s do it early, before the sun starts to burn.” He turned to Catherine. “Better for you, too, Miss. If it gets too hot, you’ll perspire and then your makeup runs and gets streaky and people think you’ve been crying.
Better to go out when it’s still cool and let people remark on how brave you were.”
“We could do it in the evening,” suggested Catherine. “I don’t mind waiting.”
“Can’t.” The executioner shook his head. “I’ve got to take my son to a ball game.”
“And I’m supposed to be at my mother’s house for dinner,” said the guard. “Listen, can’t you put it off a few hours? The courtyard is shaded most of the day. It really won’t really get the full sun until past noon.”
“Well,” conceded the executioner. “I guess I wouldn’t mind a little extra shut-eye myself. How about, say, nine-ish?”
“Ten,” said the guard. “It’s not going to take long, right? You can lop off her head and still beat the crowd for Sunday brunch.”
“Ten it is,” said the executioner. He shouldered his sword and followed the guard back down the stairs. “If you’re taking a girl to brunch, try La Terrace. They do a good fixed-price menu, and it includes champagne cocktails.”
“Champagne cocktails? I thought you guys drank Bloody Marys,” said the guard. “Ha-ha.” Their voices trailed away down the stairs.
“There’s still Gagnot,” Catherine told herself. “Abe will rescue you. You’ll be out of here in no time.”
“What is all this?” asked Charlie. He looked at the pile of metal on the table. Next to it lay thick folds of padding, along with a heavy, leather-bound book.
“Your armor, Sire,” said Oratorio.
“This isn’t my armor.”
“I’m afraid it is, Your Highness. Your uncles ordered it to be painted black, about the same time they did your clothes. It suited your image, they said.”
Charlie shook his head in exasperation. “At least the fit is the same.”
“Yes, Sire. I checked it all. The pieces are all nearly the same as my own armor.”