Not Quite Scaramouche

by Joel Rosenberg

  Tyrnael seemed to stiffen, slightly, as he stood beside her. "Two, really. Keranahan, as well as Cullinane."

  "Cullinane," she said.

  He laughed lightly. "You make that sound like a curse, my Empress."

  "It's been a curse on my house," she said. No, that wasn't entirely fair. The Cullinanes had tried to do well by her family, and that was part of the problem – doing well by them had meant Karl Cullinane taking on Rahff as an apprentice, and getting him killed; doing well had meant Walter Slovotsky taking Zherr to Biemestren to put him on the throne, and getting him killed; and doing well had meant Jason Cullinane trading Thomen's barony for the throne.

  That that had not – yet – gotten Thomen killed was her fortune.

  "Times have been difficult," he said, "and may yet be difficult again. But a Furnael graces the throne, and rumor has it that there is a wedding – and heirs, perhaps? – in the offing, and instead of Bieme and Holtun poised on the knife-edge of war, there is the Empire of Holtun-Bieme." He gestured at the canopies below, their fringes making quiet snapping sounds in the light breeze. "And below, Holtish and Biemish lie sleeping, side by side, in peace."

  She looked pointedly at the guards walking the ramparts, and he laughed. His laugh really was ingratiating.

  "Yes," he said, "peace at the point of a sword, but that's peace nonetheless. Peace and stability, with the promise of wealth and peace and stability to come. The Adahan iron mines and steel plants turn out more and better steel every year, and with Engineer Ranella building – "

  She raised a hand. "Yes, yes, yes, I know. But..."

  "But it all," he said, "rests on, well, on the expectation of stability. That's what worries me about the succession."

  She nodded. "I'd see my son married, and with an heir. Or several."

  "Yes," he said, "but that wasn't the only thing I was thinking about. With Barony Keranahan under the leadership of Governor Treseen, rather than – "

  "You'd have Elanee back?"

  He shook his head. "No. She plotted treason, and it overtook her. But legitimacy is important."

  Beralyn didn't see his point. "Forinel is years gone, and Miron fled when his mother fell," she said. "The direct line ends there, and, as to indirect claims ... I'm tempted to think that the Euar'den claim is the best, although there are other Tynearean families that might disagree."

  "One is as good as another," Tyrnael said. "Perhaps."

  "Or perhaps not?" Was that what he was about? Did he have some preference between the houses of Lord Moarin and Virael? Virael was more closely related to the Holtish baronial houses, but old – Moarin was years younger, and could more reliably be counted on to rule the barony longer. Both had possible heirs a'plenty.

  "Oh," he said. "I see little difference between the two, looking – as I do, I must confess – from the point of view of a Biemish baron, rather than an imperial. What's important, I think, is the legitimacy. Whether one likes one candidate or another, the important thing is that he be legitimate, that he be seen as the one and proper heir to the barony. Don't you think so?"

  She frowned. She had played the game as well as she could, but he had somehow brought the conversation to a place where she could only agree, and not know what he was getting at.

  "Of course," she said. Yes, stability was important. Would anybody whose son sat on the throne of an emperor ever doubt that?

  "I thank you," he said. "And I'm pleased that you agree with me." There was a light rustle of cloth and the rubbing of metal links on each other, and he held a thin silver chain in his hand. "The stone," he said, "is, I'm embarrassed to say, simply a garnet, although a well-polished and utterly flawless one. But it's been in my family for more than six generations, passed down through the generations, never from father to son."

  He placed it in the palm of her hand. "Oh, there's a little magic on it, just the mildest of glamours; it tends to make sweet things taste a little sweeter, cool water a tad more refreshing, and pain hurt just a trifle less – but that's not the point. I hope you'll accept it as a memento of this conversation," he said.

  Well, she could – and would – have it checked by Hen-rad, but since he knew that she could and would, there was little chance that it was other than what he said it was.

  Her fingers closed around the coolness of the stone. "Of course, Baron Tyrnael," she said. "I'm not sure, my dear Baron, what is it that you think you've manipulated me into agreeing to, but perhaps you'll enlighten me some time, if not now."

  "I wouldn't think of trying to manipulate you, my Dowager Empress," he said, carefully.

  "Of course not," she said. He wouldn't think of it any more than he would think of breathing, or of pissing; he would do it naturally, without having to think.

  But just because he was trying to manipulate her, that didn't mean she was unwilling to go along.

  If what he wanted was stability, then he and she were on the same side. For now.

  Chapter 11

  Night Moves I:

  Erenor and Pirojil

  Erenor's feet hurt. Pirojil could tell that, because every few moments, he'd grunt and groan in pain, then heroically stifle the grunts and groans, and force himself to keep going, waiting for somebody to applaud. It was the sort of thing that made Pirojil more than idly fantasize about pounding Erenor's face with his fist until it resembled raw meat.

  But, to be fair – and Pirojil tried to be fair, when possible – Erenor wasn't, in fact, making any more noise than Pirojil himself was, and less than Ahira.

  They moved quietly, single file, along the edge of the road. Kethol, probably, and Ahira, certainly, could have made their way through the dark down the twisting forest paths, but neither Erenor nor Pirojil could have.

  Ahira, of course, had the darksight that enabled dwarves to tunnel through stone in what was utter blackness to any human eyes – it was said that a dwarf could see, although not far, simply by putting a hand up in front of him, and make out forms, even in complete darkness, by seeing the reflected heat from his palm. Following a road under the twinkling of the overhead stars and the pulsating Faerie lights didn't even cause the dwarf to squint a little.

  And Kethol, having exchanged his soldier's boots for a woodsman's buskins, could have kept up a careful and virtually silent run, if he had been alone, for hours on end. It was all Pirojil could do to keep up without sounding like a cow stomping down the road.

  Well, at least Pirojil wasn't as much of a drag on the party as Erenor was. It would be terribly embarrassing to be the limitation.

  He wished that they could have taken the horses, but the idea was to sneak out, to make it to town without anybody who might be watching the farm knowing, without putting hunters on their own backtrail. The sound of a horse clopping down the Prince's Road at night would travel far and wide, and Pirojil knew from personal experience that a thin leather rope or steel wire strung across a road at rider-height would be invisible in the dark, and could knock a man off his horse and leave him turtled on the ground... if it didn't snap his neck, first.

  So they walked. You made your own luck in this world, most of the time, and Pirojil would do his best to make his luck good. All the precautions might be unnecessary – if there weren't other assassins, or if the ones left were busy breaking themselves against the rock of the defenses at the farmhouse, they might be able to make their way to Denial's Ford without any interference, no matter what they did.

  If they didn't run into an ore, say, or a wolf, or a boar.

  Well, a boar was unlikely, at that. After all, they tended to sleep the night away, the way decent people did, the way Pirojil wished, with every step, that he was doing. And, as to wolves, it was a rare wolf that would attack a human, or – so he hoped and thought – a dwarf, either. And an orc? They were, he thought, too far south for orcs, at least for now. Like all vermin, though – mice, insects, rats, slavers – they tended to spread themselves far and wide. Did they hunt at night? Pirojil certainly didn't know, and
didn't know anybody who knew.

  The night, though, was alive with sounds. That boded well. It took quite a woodsman to keep himself quiet enough to not disturbed the fidgetbugs, with their clichétyclicketyclicking, and – at least, according to Kethol, who ought to know – the distant taroooo of a hairy owl was a sure indication that the bird thought it was safe to announce to potential mates and possible rivals that he had seized enough mice to fill his belly, and that he was ready for less immediate needs.

  A quiet trilling that Pirojil couldn't have distinguished from a robin's song was Kethol calling a halt, and Pirojil dropped to a squat, while Erenor staggered on a few steps first. Each pebble along the road that he kicked sounded louder in Pirojil's than a drumbeat, but, realistically, it probably couldn't have been heard very far over the whispering of the wind through the trees.

  The wind appeared to be picking up, in fact. Pirojil looked up.

  The sky to the west was dark now, the twinkling of stars obscured by clouds.

  Kethol, moving like smoke – his silent movement was, even after all these years, still a matter of some amazement to Pirojil – worked his way back to where Pirojil and Erenor were, Ahira with him.

  "I smell rain coming," he whispered. "It's not far off."

  Erenor sighed. "Then we should find some shelter and hole up until it passes, yes?" The note of fatality and depression in his voice said that he already knew what the answer was going to be.

  "No," Pirojil said. "We can make faster progress in the rain." With raindrops pounding down on the forest, it would be somewhere between difficult and impossible for even a careful listener to hear footsteps over it.

  It would, of course, be miserable. But it would also be a spot of good luck to be able to move quickly down the center of the road – its long-dead builders had made it convex, probably to increase the number of centuries it would take to wear it down – without having to worry out being heard.

  The farther they got away from the farm, the better off they were. A half dozen – at most – men could only be spread so far. And as soon as Pirojil and the rest came to the first fork in the road – a crossroads, actually, where the road from Denial's Ford to Belneten's Spring crossed the Prince's Road – there would be three more ways for them to go, and therefore one-third the chance that they'd meet up with anybody lying in wait.

  At least, that was the idea.

  "How soon?" Ahira asked. "I can smell it coming, too, but I don't have a feel for it."

  Kethol shrugged. "I don't know. But soon." He turned to Pirojil, although Pirojil could not make out his expression in the darkness. "There's another possibility," he said. "Kelleren talked about a trail off the Road, one that's a shortcut to Denial's Ford."

  "But Erenor and I couldn't make any speed along it in the dark." Forget, for a moment, the branches dangling down, waiting to tear at your face and eyes; ignore the difficulty in staying on an ever-twisting path that followed the lines of the land, not the will of a builder; they'd be stumbling and falling over every root, rock, and divot along the trail.

  "No," Kethol said, "you couldn't. You'd be lucky to be able to keep up a slow walk. But Ahira and I can," he said. "If you two stick to the road, you should be able to reach the crossroads, and get to Belneten's Spring at about the same time that we make Denial's Ford. You can move a lot faster once it starts raining."

  And if one party didn't make it, the other one was more likely to.

  It was hard to tell from Kethol's tone what he thought of the idea, which probably meant that he had only brought it up because he felt he ought to. That was the thing about Kethol, he would do what he thought he had to, and let others fall around him, or not, as they pleased.

  It was one of the things that had always kept Durine and Pirojil reminded that Kethol was as much in charge as they were.

  Splitting your forces was, whether you were part of an army or just a pair of comrades, always something to be approached with caution. At least Kethol would have Ahira to watch his back. Pirojil would have Erenor, and while Erenor wasn't entirely useless in everything, his swordsmanship was pitiful, striving toward weak, and not striving very hard. He was a perfectly fine hand with a flintlock pistol, of course – as long as he had the muzzle of the weapon pressed tightly against the target.

  And not that the pistols would be of much use in the rain. The pan practically sucked water out of the air. Well, there were advantages – slaver rifles were even more useless in the rain.

  Erenor touched him lightly on the arm. "We might be able to make a quick time, by ourselves," he said. "Perhaps even with a source of light – "

  "How you'd expect to keep a torch going in a hard rain escapes me," Kethol said. "And if you've packed a lantern in your rucksacks, I'd want to know why."

  Pirojil didn't answer. No, they didn't have a torch, but ... "Very well," he said. "Let's separate."

  It was just as well that he knew that Kethol was not a schemer by nature, it probably wouldn't occur to him until much later, if ever, that he had ended up saddling Pirojil with that dead weight of an Erenor.

  Pirojil shook his head. Well, if somebody was loyal, wise, and forward-thinking, he'd probably have found another means to make his way through life than soldiering.

  "Let's go," he said.

  The rainstorm didn't start so much as it shattered. One moment, Pirojil and Erenor were walking down the road in a darkness that was, at best, shades of darkest gray on lightest black, and the next moment, with a flash of lightning followed almost immediately by a crash of thunder that left his ears ringing, cold rain smashed down on the Prince's Road, clawing at it and at them with icy fingers.

  Erenor tried to ran for the shelter of the trees, but Pirojil grabbed at his arm.

  He shouted, No, you idiot, lightning likes to strike at trees, but the ringing in his ears drowned out his voice, even in his own head, and his vision was wiped out in another white flash that he more felt than heard.

  He grabbed at Erenor's sleeve and ran, the wet stones of the road slick beneath his boots. Only a heroic fool would be looking out for somebody traveling now, and the nearest heroic fool that Pirojil knew was on his way to Denial's Ford with Ahira. Erenor's boots pounded on the hard road, and after a few staggering steps he began to match Pirojil's long strides. Pirojil had spent most of his time soldiering as a horseman, but the trouble with the damn horses is that they tended to die on you at the most inconvenient times – times when you had to be somewhere else, and fast, because if you didn't, you weren't going to be able to do what you had to do, and when soldiers didn't do what they had to do, the people they were protecting died.

  And sometimes they died anyway.

  Ill-used skills came back slowly. The trick was to pace yourself, to keep up a jog that ate the road in bites you could stand, but didn't leave you gasping for breath. That was easy to do on a cool day, the straps of your rucksack bound together with a length of rope to keep it tight against your back instead of bouncing with every step, some officer calling out a cadence to keep the pace even and constant, or at least it was easier than it was now, with some cursed thing in his rucksack poking at the same spot on his back every time it slapped against him, which it did with every step, and with every step making him colder and wetter than he had been the moment before.

  The rain eased from a horrid downpour to a steady pace, and that only seemed to make him colder. That was infuriating – the rain easing up should have made him at least a little less miserable.

  What was even more infuriating was that Erenor was keeping up with him, his steps matching Pirojil's, one for one. Sometimes it was too easy to forget that Erenor, despite his failings, was at least ten years younger and in good shape, and had probably made it a point to keep his wind good, out of the necessity of taking to his heels out of town more often than not.

  But where the flesh was weaker, an iron will could be stronger; Pirojil kept running. If he lowered his head and only watched the ground in front of him,
he could forget, or at least pretend to fool himself into forgetting, how much farther he had to go. If he stopped, even for a moment, he would feel how cold and miserable he was, how his clothes had soaked up probably half his weight in water, how his boots were waterlogged, as well, how the fire in his lungs burned hotter and hotter with every step, how...

  His feet shot out from underneath him, and he landed, hard, on his right hip, his sword somehow coming loose from its scabbard and rattling off in the darkness, his pistols tumbling to the wet road.

  "Pirojil!" Erenor was at his side, helpful hands shaming Pirojil as Erenor guided him to his feet. "How badly are you hurt?" he asked.

  "I can manage," Pirojil said, ignoring the way his hip pulsated in bright red agony with every heartbeat. He thought about reaching into his pouch for the flask of healing draughts, but put the thought aside. Those were expensive, and hard to get, and they weren't for his comfort, but to make it possible for him to do his job, and – pain or no pain – he would not be stopped.

  Erenor scooped up Pirojil's pistols, and tucked them in his own belt.

  "I'll need those back," Pirojil said, holding out a hand.

  Instead of complying, Erenor stooped to retrieve Pirojil's sword, and handed it to him, properly hilt-first. "You can have them back anytime you want, Pirojil," Erenor said, tossing his head to clear the rain from his sodden hair. "Anytime, that is, that it's dry enough for these to do anything useful." He drew one of the pistols, cocked the hammer, and pointed it toward the sky.

  "No, don't." Pirojil took a half-step toward the wizard, stopping when the pain in his right hip brought a gasp to his lips.

  "But these are wet..." Erenor pulled the trigger, which fell with a loud snap.

  Wham. Flame shot skyward, and the stink of sulfur filled the air.

  Pirojil slapped the pistol from Erenor's hand, although what the point was of that escaped him. It was empty – now – and besides, it was Pirojil's pistol.

  "You can't count on them to work in the rain," he said. "Unless, of course, some feeble-minded wizard posing as a soldier pulls on the trigger to show how useless wet powder is, which – since my luck is bad enough that I'm saddled with you as a companion – is guaranteed to be the one time that water hasn't quite reached the pan, and that the greased cloth wrapping the bullet has kept any water from getting into the barrel."