by Mark Smylie
“Please know, my Lord, that your dignity under duress has not gone unnoticed these many years, and that there are those of us who have watched from afar, hoping very strongly that some way back into the good graces of the High King might be found for you and your line,” Lord Rohan said quietly. “Your father is, well, perhaps not pursuing the best path . . .”
“I suspect my father wishes to marry me to Lady Silga, if that is what you mean?” Arduin replied, suddenly thankful that the young clerk’s news allowed him that guess.
“Yes, and that, alas, will not likely happen,” said Lord Rohan, shaking his head. “Baron Guiton is very glad for the attention, but he will not be the one to rescue your family.”
“Your father’s wasting his time, is what Rohan’s trying to say. After ten long years he’s desperate for patrons, and he’s thrown in his lot with the Crown Prince and the Iron Cock, and they’ve dangled Djarfort’s daughter in front of him as a carrot, and they’re going to string him along as long as they’re enjoying the flattery and the money,” the Duke spat. “A marriage makes perfect sense, but it won’t come first. You’ll have to do something to make a good marriage possible. And I mean you. Your father thinks that he can redeem the honor of the Orwain name, but he can’t. It’s got to be you.”
“But how?” Arduin blurted, then immediately regretted. “Father . . . I must admit Father has also urged me to return to the Tournaments this summer, and aim for the Champion’s crown again, and I have thought hard upon it.”
“It would be good to see you back in the lists, I admit; we jousted a long time ago, didn’t we?” the Duke asked.
“Yes, at the Tournament of Flowers, almost ten years ago, before . . .” Arduin trailed off. “Before . . .” Before I killed him.
“Before, yes,” the Duke said, coming to a stop in the middle of the Lower Courtyards and turning to face Arduin, staring at him with his one good eye. “That won’t do. That won’t do at all. No one blames you for what happened; well, I guess some do, but we all know accidents happen. But returning to the jousts, seeing you take to the lists again? No, a decade may have passed, and luckily for your sister Uthella of Uthmark has remained the most conspicuously scandalous woman in the Kingdoms, but that will just trigger a lot of unpleasant memories, and give people a chance to retell old stories.” Arduin flushed, and hung his head for a moment. He felt the Duke’s one eye studying him. But which eye? he suddenly thought.
“My cousin Owen and the Erid King are planning a summer campaign, and they mean to have Porloss’ head on a platter before the end of it,” the Duke said finally. “This time I’ll be joining them, and so will King Gavant of Huelt. We are to raise a force of three thousand knights and seven thousand footmen, the largest army we’ve gathered during Awain’s reign as High King, and we’re headed right into the Manon Mole. We’re not just going after Porloss, but after all those hardscrabble hill knights that have called that place home since the dawn of time. I know Owen has passed you by for his recent rosters, I’m sure he had his reasons, but I decide the men who will travel with me. Come with me this summer, as part of my contingent, you and your household knights and a portion of the levy from your country estates. Action in the field, Lord Arduin, in defense of the High King; that’s the way back into his good graces.”
Arduin stood there, thunderstruck. “My . . . my Lord Duke, it would be an honor,” he finally managed to get out. “I have seven personal knights and five squires at your disposal, and by right can raise a levy of fifty sergeants-at-arms from amongst the tenants of our estates.”
“Good,” Duke Pergwyn said with a soft smile. “The plan is to start right after the Feast of the Four Kings, probably the second or third day of Myradéum. So spend the spring preparing, and expect my summons and letters of commission sometime during the month of Sirenium.” He clapped Arduin on the shoulder.
“Congratulations, my Lord Arduin,” said Lord Rohan with a short bow, and then they were off, with the Duke’s entourage loudly clattering by.
When they were gone, Arduin finally let out a long breath.
“Pardon me, Lord Arduin, but Islik’s balls,” said Sir Holgar, his mouth gaping. “Did that really just happen?”
The Duke of Enlos, cousin to the High King, just offered me his patronage, and a chance to redeem my family’s honor, Arduin thought. He looked up at the bright spring sky. After ten years, oh happy day. And all thanks to a stray question about some country lordling’s horse-faced wife. He had the sudden urge to run back up to the High King’s Hall and give the woman a kiss. He wondered for a moment what his father would say when he told him, then decided with a sudden laugh that he didn’t care. He felt like everyone in the Lower Courtyards was staring at him. As well they should, he thought.
“Gentlemen, to the Great Temple of our Divine King,” he said, feeling himself in good humor for the first time in . . . well, in years. “For I believe offerings in His name are very much in order. Then let’s find the others, and get home.” He grinned. “We’ve got some swords to sharpen, and a rebel earl to kill.”
Harvald crossed into the streets of the University Quarter of Therapoli in keen high spirits—feeling refreshed from his stop at the city house of his father—but with a stomach full of butterflies and a burning sensation in his ears; it was a feeling that he had been unable to shake since Stjepan had slid the map out of its scroll tube. Someone is talking about me, he thought with a laugh. At his father’s house he had changed from the dirty, grubby travel clothes that he had felt like he had been wearing for three weeks into clean, fresh city garb: a black doublet with unobtrusive gold thread embroidery on the sleeves, black brocade knickerbockers and breeches over hose and a subtle codpiece, and pointed leather shoes. He had grabbed a plain brown sleeveless half-coat lined with fur to help ward off the spring chill, and he had affixed a small gold badge in the shape of a wyvern clutching a quill to his coat to show that he was a member of the Chancery. His leather satchel, with its precious cargo, was slung over one shoulder, and a dagger and coin purse were discreetly slung next to his left hip. To anyone glancing his way he would have appeared to be more or less what he was: a clerk from the High King’s Court, perhaps from a moneyed family, on his way on some errand into the oldest and greatest University in the Middle Kingdoms.
Except, of course, that his business had absolutely nothing to do with the Court.
The University sat on a rise in the middle of its own Quarter of the city, north of the Forum and west of the High King’s Hall and High Quarter. The original buildings of the University had been built in the Golden Age in imitation of the Golan Great Schools, but none had lasted to the present day. The University had been damaged or destroyed twice, and rebuilt, most recently in the years following the Worm Kings’ sack of the city. Its central core was a sprawling marble building that once wrapped around a grid of four square quads. The two lower quads were named the Lower Quad and the Library Quad. The wing that separated the two upper quads had been destroyed during the War of the Throne Thief, and rather than rebuild it the two quads had been allowed to connect into one large Upper Quad. Over the centuries the University had effectively expanded into the streets surrounding its original core and campus, and now many of its administrative offices and the residences for students and magisters were now found in adjacent or nearby buildings, including the student colleges that had been chartered as affiliate parts of the University: Highwall College, the oldest and most prestigious, and now largely a bastion of noble Aurian elitism; Drewson’s College, which had been started as a counter to Highwall, and served as a haven and sponsor for students of low means; the College of the Globe, a haven for alchemists and natural philosophers who believed that the world was round; and the Mottist College of Therapoli, the youngest and most controversial college in the University. A Black College, dedicated to the occult and the Nameless Cults of the Forbidden Gods, was naturally also rumored to exist, but if it did, then it at least had no official building to call
its own.
Outside and around those buildings had grown an entire Quarter, filled with merchants and vendors eager to serve the University and its students. Book binders and booksellers, paper shops and quill makers, scriptoriums, laundresses, boarding houses, cheap taverns and eateries, money lenders and brothels all clustered together in the narrow streets and alleys that sprawled, maze-like, out from the University itself. Harvald felt a pang of nostalgia as he passed amongst them: Mercer’s Fine Books, where he had purchased his first copy of The Secret Book of Azoth, a grimoire on the use of magic mirrors by the pseudonymous “Mercury King”; the boarding house at the corner of Ink Street and what the locals called Backstab Alley, where he and Stjepan had rented rooms for several months; the Feathered Quill, the tavern on Gate Street where the Lords of Book and Street had first formed up for battle during the War of the False Book. By the gods that was a silly name, Harvald mused as he passed the Quill. The Lords of Book and Street, who had come up with that? Had that been Fionne, the poor bastard?
Upon arriving there as a young man, Harvald had been told by older students that the maze-like nature of the University Quarter was the mirror and manifestation of its “underground self” because, according to campus legend, it had been built not only upon the previous incarnations of the University but also upon the ancient dungeons of Myrad. Harvald knew that strictly speaking that was not likely to be true, as the University had been founded about forty years before the rule of the Mad King. But many students reported that they became lost while wandering in the streets of the Quarter at night, and the superstitious did not like to travel after dark. Harvald had never felt afraid there. The notion that a thing or a person might have an “underground self” that was different, in ways large or small, than their outer self had been very exciting to young Harvald, for he certainly found that to be true about himself. He, Stjepan, Gilgwyr, and some others had spent more than a few hours poking around in the basements and cellars of the University, looking for the entrance to the old buried dungeons, but while they delved deep and found many things to wonder at, including buried rooms and halls that belonged to the Golden Age University, they never found anything that seemed to fit the bill for the dungeons that had once imprisoned the Divine King.
The whole city, in fact, had a deep underground life: the layers of older parts of the city, now buried and built upon; the cisterns and sewer and waterworks, which fed the fountains of the city’s plazas and its two Baths before emptying into the bay; and cellars, crypts, and ancient passages built by the inhabitants of the city over the course of almost two thousand years. All interconnected. Enough secrets to keep a man who enjoyed secrets busy for a lifetime.
And while Harvald enjoyed secrets, and had traversed parts of the city underground in pursuit of them, he was most interested in the kind that brought with their discovery the potential for some useful reward. The kind, he very much hoped, that he carried in his satchel.
Though no longer a member of the University, Harvald’s position as a clerk in the Chancery of the High King’s Hall allowed him access to the campus and, most importantly, its vast Library, the greatest in the Middle Kingdoms bar none. The Library had grown from a small scriptorium and scroll room at the University’s founding, to now fill three of the four building wings of the Library Quad, effectively forming a single large U-shaped wing of the University. While most wings had multiple entrances—certainly many from the interior quads of the University, and usually one or two from the exterior streets surrounding the University campus—the Library had only a single entrance at one end of the U shape, located in the center wing in the middle of the quads. Most of the windows and doors on the lower floors were bricked up and walled over. The rest of the U-shaped wings were filled with chambers and halls filled with books and scrolls and study rooms, arranged in somewhat haphazard fashion and cared for by a small cadre of librarians under Magister Clodarius, master of the Chair of Letters. In general the chambers and halls were readily accessible by students, save for the chambers in the furthest part of the U shape, where the University housed the rare books in its collections too valuable to let students handle without supervision, and books the access to which had been restricted or even outright forbidden. Such books were kept behind locked and magically warded doors: grimoires of occult spells, books on necromancy, secret screeds on the Forbidden Gods of the Nameless Cults of the Damned.
Which, naturally, was exactly where Harvald was headed.
He passed under the main arched gateway to the University off the High Promenade, went up the stepped street to the heights of the Quarter, and approached the main doors at the South Wing. The few guards there spotted his Chancery badge and recognized him, and just waved him through. He glanced up at the statues that lined the main entry hall as he passed them, depicting some of the first and greatest magisters of the University, beginning with the flanking statues of Eldyr and Maderyd, two of the Hundred Sons of Mad Myrad. He wondered what they would think of an impostor walking so cavalierly through the front doors.
Crossing the Lower Quad felt a bit like a homecoming as it always did, and his mind was already beginning to anticipate the more difficult parts of his intended expedition. Ignoring the curious glances that his Chancery badge earned from some of the younger students that saw him, he passed into the doors of the Center Wing of the University and turned right into the long corridor that would take him to the doorway to the Library.
Getting into the University itself was never really a problem, even if the front gates were locked as they sometimes were at night; there was always a door or a window somewhere left unattended. Entry into the Library was a bit trickier, as he and Stjepan and Gilgwyr had discovered during their days as students. The only entrance was the one he now passed through, and it was attended at all times. He forced himself to look and more importantly feel casual. You’ve done this a hundred times before, and this time is no different, he repeated in his head as he approached the front desk of the Library.
Luckily he recognized the librarian behind it, a sour old Danian nicknamed Grim Liam by the students, and relief washed over him. By the gods, I can even try to make this easy, he thought. Like most of the librarians, Grim Liam had been a student once himself; many remained as librarians out of love for the Library and the University; out of love for Magister Clodarius, who was one of the most popular teachers there; or, as was the case with Liam, because they were unable to find service with a lord’s household or at the High King’s Hall, and did not wish to risk the more unpredictable life of a scribe- or sage-for-hire. Most of the latter sort of librarian accepted their lot in life with equanimity; but not Grim Liam, who took his disappointment and anger out on the students that had to deal with him.
Harvald, however, had seen in Liam’s anger an avenue to friendship and perhaps with it, opportunity, and so over the years he had gone out of his way to break down Liam’s surly demeanor by buying him drinks when he saw him in the local taverns, and confiding in him some juicy but meaningless bits of gossip from the High King’s Court. He’d even taken Grim Liam to one of the less reputable dancing halls over on Penny Street to ogle several fine-looking temptresses. Of course, he had hardly singled Grim Liam out in some prescient fashion preparing for just this very moment; rather, he’d spent time and money like that with hundreds of men and women across the city over the years, all as a way of tilting the odds, as he liked to think of it.
And on this occasion, his gamble had paid off, for rather than looking up from the ledgers to observe his approach with the scowl with which he greeted most other visitors, Grim Liam’s face broke out in a huge, friendly grin when he saw that it was Harvald walking toward him.
“My dear Harvald!” Grim Liam said, standing and offering a hand. “How is life at the Chancery? It’s been a dog’s age since I’ve seen you here in the Quarter.”
“Aye, what was it, last Midéadad, I think?” Harvald replied, heartily shaking his hand. “Over at the Pig & Prince.
”
“I believe you are correct, right after the Feast of the Scales,” said Liam, pleased that Harvald had remembered. “They must be keeping you busy over there. Just the other day I was thinking to myself that I hadn’t seen you yet this year, nor this past winter either.”
“Aye, haven’t been in the Quarter much of late, spent most of the winter deep in the Records Hall at the Chancery, and only got back from a journey out of the city just recently,” said Harvald. “Court business, and all.”
“Ah, perhaps then a few tales over drinks might be in order?” said Liam hopefully.
“Indeed, I may be headed back out of the city in a few days, but perhaps we could try for the Pig & Prince again, say the evening of this Secondum?”
“Excellent!” cried Liam. “I look forward to it. Of course, if the Court takes you elsewhere, I would understand completely.”
“If I am forced to leave the city beforehand, I promise I shall find you upon my return,” Harvald said with an easy smile. “We are long overdue for a drink.” He allowed a cloud to cross over his face. “This latest work has been most troubling, and I would not mind a chance to unburden myself. Indeed, I am glad it is you at the desk this day, as I have an unusual request. I’ve been asked to make a copy of some of the pages of the Libra di historum Manonesian for someone at the Chancery. They don’t have a copy of it there, it’s quite rare as you know, and the only copy I’m aware of in the city is the one in the rare books collection here. Some interesting stuff came up during the campaign against the Rebel Earl last year, some stuff about the old histories of the Manon Mole and the Wyvern King, and the only thing left to be done is to compare what was learned up in the hills with what’s written in there.”