The Rose of the World

by Jude Fisher

  He led them back up the winding stairs to his chamber and ushered them in ahead of him. He made a great show of relocking the door (couldn’t have the girl thinking she’d be away from here with just a kiss) and stashing the keys back on his belt, then turned to the girl. She was staring at the prisoner with a puzzled expression on her face.

  Then:‘Oh!’ she exclaimed.‘You’re Erol Bardson, the King’s cousin. The trait—’

  Flinn Ogson grabbed her by the hand before she could be even more indiscreet and pulled her towards his bedchamber. ‘Wait for me,’ he called back over his shoulder to the prisoner.

  ‘Oh, I’ll wait,’ said Erol Bardson.‘I’ve waited three months, I’m sure I can manage another ten minutes.’

  The dungeon keeper turned back. ‘It’ll take longer than that,’ he said, affronted.

  ‘I doubt it.’ The lord took charge of the dungeon master’s chair, put his filthy boots up on the table and rocked backwards. Beneath the table he could just make out a flask and goblet. As Flinn Ogson disappeared into the other room with his hand on the serving girl’s commodious rump, he rescued the inexpertly hidden items and helped himself.

  ‘No one saw you?’ Auda’s mouth pursed suspiciously.

  ‘No one.’

  ‘And the bodies?’

  ‘Down the garderobe and in the embrace of the wide Northern Ocean.’ He’d done the dungeon keeper first, then taken his time with the girl who, thinking it would save her life, had been quite willing, at first. His lips curled at the memory. ‘Feeding the Nemesis by now,’ he joked.

  ‘Ssh!’ Auda made a sign against ill omen. ‘There is altogether too much sorcery in this world without invoking more. Perhaps we shall have a chance to cleanse it, you and I, once this deed is done. Restore the kingdom to its pure northern roots.’

  Erol Bardson raised a grime-encrusted eyebrow at the King’s mother. ‘You will forgive me, lady,’ he said softly, ‘if I see a certain irony in the situation. Seeking aid from our mortal enemies seems a rum way to restore the Eyran line. Not – ’ he forestalled her sharp retort with a hand gesture – ‘that I am complaining. I am more than happy to take your commission, and the throne too in time, if you will have me.’

  Auda shifted uncomfortably. ‘Perhaps as regent,’ she said stiffly. ‘We must see how the knucklebones fall.’

  She beckoned him out onto the balcony, a solid granite affair topped with spiky iron railings. Three iron ravens adorned the most prominent spikes. Finely worked, they were, each feather delineated with infinite care. Then one of them bobbed its head, uttered a low caw and flew to the King’s mother’s outstretched hand.

  ‘Ah, Memory,’ she said softly. ‘You were always the boldest.’

  She turned to the Earl of Broadfell.

  ‘Memory lives up to his name. Send him to me when you need secret entry into the city and I shall see to it that you . . . and your allies . . . are admitted.’

  She handed the raven to him and it cocked its head and fixed him with the beady gaze of one contemplating the exquisite juiciness of the eyeball it saw within easy striking distance of its beak.

  Erol held the bird away from him in distaste.

  Fifteen

  Torments and miracles

  Tanto Vingo stared out of his window into the courtyard and drank in the perfect view – ancient time-eroded cobbles, elegant terracotta pots filled with bright blooms, spills of vine and bougainvillaea against stonework of soft orangepink, an elegant marble fountain fashioned centuries ago by Firo, the greatest sculptor of his age; and thirty naked nomad women being lashed into submission by a handful of his most trusted guards.

  His new chambers in Jetra’s ancient fortress were very fine, he had to admit. Circesian rugs carpeted the beautifully tiled floors, the walls were blanketed with fabulous tapestries and chased silver goblets lay strewn across the vast oak table amongst the remains of an exquisite banquet. The kitchen staff had excelled themselves this time. They had prepared roast swan stuffed with goose, chicken, quail and hummingbirds; two suckling piglets filled with grapes, a haunch of venison, lamb foetuses in a rich gravy of rendered cats’ hearts; two savoury beef and mushroom pies; a huge confection of cream and fruit and liqueur-soaked cake; breads and pastries and rice spiced with safflower. It was more than enough to feed a dozen hungry lords; but he had eaten it all himself, alone but for a pair of slave girls who brought him a spittoon whenever he required it, or wheeled his great chair to the privy so that he could empty his guts to make room for more.

  He belched out of the window again and was satisfied to note that two of the women were begging for mercy now and were ready to worship the goddess with the captain and his men. He would have them all raped and then burned anyway, though they did not know that this prior trial would prove to be a mere entertainment. His new flame contraption had undergone another amendment: it would be useful to test it in private before making the spectacle a public event to which he might invite his beloved brother.

  Forty minutes later, all the women had been raped, the guards’ energy and enthusiasm was spent and he was bored again. He signalled the serving girls to wheel him back to the table and there picked distractedly at the remnants, even though he had no appetite for the food, none at all.

  The chamber had once been the receiving room of the lords of this province: Hesto and Greving Dystra, once loyal, respected members of Istria’s Ruling Council, now sadly reduced to a pathetic, stinking, weakened state by a bloody flux which had mysteriously come upon them the previous week. He was quite surprised they were still alive: their frames, already old and frail, had been wasted almost to nothing by near-constant vomiting and diarrhoea. There was nothing left to them now but skin and bone and deep-burning spirit. He planned to destroy the last of that this very afternoon.

  It was intoxicating to have the run of the Eternal City. With the Dystras sadly incapacitated and the Lords Prionan, Sestran and Fortran having sped to Cera and Forent to make good the northern defences and oversee the construction of the new fleet, now that Rui Finco’s men had brought them the northern shipmaker they so desperately needed, Jetra lay in the hands of Tycho Issian. And since the Lord of Cantara was much taken up with his own plans for an attack on the Eyran capital, he had appointed Tanto his deputy in all things. What I could have done, Tanto thought with genuine regret, if I had still been in possession of all my bodily parts, my strength, my health; my looks!

  His first act upon finding himself effective ruler of this domain had been to order all the castle’s mirrors covered. The first girl who had been summoned to tend him had shown her disgust at his condition with a curl of the lip. He had tied her to the bed and as she lay back expecting the usual treatment under such circumstances, he had cut those lips from her with her sharpest knife; then her cunt-lips for good measure.

  Then he had ordered a physician to sear the wounds, an act which he had also enjoyed; and had ordered her cast into his brother’s cell, making sure she knew who it was she was to be sequestered with. It was a filthy place, the Miseria: filthier now that he had ordered the guards never to clean it. The whore’s wounds had become infected in no time at all. Chained hand and foot to the seeping wall down there, Saro had watched her die and could do nothing to alleviate her suffering. Tanto had watched him weep and realised with glee there was no end to the torments he could inflict upon his brother, and no one to stop him, either.

  The Lord of Cantara was far too busy to concern himself with reports concerning Tanto Vingo’s many depravities, most of which he would in any case have dismissed as either highly exaggerated or stemming from the overly squeamish sensibilities of observers. No, Tycho Issian’s mind was bent to the exclusion of all other matters on devising a way to take back the Rosa Eldi; a woman for whom he had agreed a bride-price and who had been unfairly and inconceivably snatched away from him at the previous summer’s Allfair. Still he burned for her. His mind and body gave him no surcease from desire. If he slept – which was rare, and brie
f – his slumber was filled with troubled dreams, and he awoke in a state of uncomfortable tumescence; awake, her naked image hovered provocatively before his eyes even as he preached in the Great Hall, the market squares and the campo, paraded his troops or addressed a room full of advisers. If he stumbled in his speech, entranced by a flash of her pale rose-tipped breasts, or his vision became glazed at a glimpse of her luminously hairless pudenda, no one had the temerity to remark it, to his face.

  Behind his back, however, rumour had it that the Lord of Cantara was entirely off his head.

  This impression was enhanced both by his physical appearance – dishevelled, unkempt, his black eyes blazing, pupils dilated like bottomless pits; and by the ‘advisers’ he had gathered about himself. A more ragtag collection of hucksters and ne’er-do-wells you could never imagine. The few respectable men amongst them were traders with some knowledge of the layout of the northern capital, a group of veterans of the last campaign against the Northern Isles and a handful of disciples genuinely moved by his impassioned pleas to the populace to rise up and bring Falla’s word to the barbaric North. But the rest represented the worst elements in Istria. In the grip of his mania, Tycho Issian appeared to have lost all sense of perspective and propriety, for he surrounded himself with sellswords (who’d fought for both sides and cared not a damn why, so long as they were paid), mountebanks and shysters, old men with a score to settle; young men out to make a killing; those driven by anger, by greed and an eye for a business opportunity. In short, the sort of folk always to be found fanning the flames of conflict.

  The most recent addition to this tribe was Plutario, a man who had been brought to his chambers secretly one night since he had been overheard claiming that he was able to render folk invisible (under precisely the right conjunction of stars, which had so far never quite seemed to happen). It was an irony remarked upon only in private by those well out of the southern lord’s earshot, that in a land in which even growing the wrong herbs would currently get you burned as a magic-maker, Tycho Issian would openly take such a man into his employ.

  On the basis of the knowledge and surmise provided by this motley band, Tycho had drawn up maps, charts and diagrams of the city and its castle, as well as planning a fair division of its women and its spoils; but no one as yet had a plan for getting past the harbour defences. It was well known that Halbo had never been sacked from the sea in all its long history. Attacking from landward meant sailing through the treacherous and well-fortified Sharking Straits, then making a hazardous trek southwards over a formidable mountain range. The man who proposed this course was a yeka-trader. He had, he said, a thousand or more of the beasts which were born to this sort of work. They had originated in the lands beyond the Dragon’s Backbone and had traversed the Golden Mountains and the Skarn. They could haul wagons and each carry half a dozen armed men: more than enough for a shock raid on the capital, storming the castle and disabling the guards in the Sentinel Towers to allow a fleet to sail in and finish the job.

  Tycho was so excited by this prospect that he fairly danced with the man; until someone pointed out the logistics of transporting a herd of such vast beasts by sea. Given the addition of soldiers, crew, oar-slaves, equipment, weaponry and supplies – let alone the captives they would take from Halbo – they would require a fleet of a thousand ships. Currently, they had precisely thirty.

  At the point of this realisation, Tycho Issian bellowed for everyone to leave.

  All except Plutario, whom he beckoned to stay.

  ‘I need you,’ he reiterated, ‘to veil our ships with a secret mist, one which human eyes cannot penetrate. That way we can steal into their harbour unseen and storm the castle. Then I can steal the Lady away, and be gone.’

  Plutario looked surprised. He was not a man who had yet learned to guard his expressions, but fortunately the Lord of Cantara was still in need of the abilities others claimed for him. ‘Forgive me, my lord,’ he started, in his soft Gilan accent. He looked nervous. Small beads of perspiration burst out across his forehead. With his unusually pale complexion and fat-softened features, he looked like a cheese sweating in the sun. He licked his lips, started again. ‘I was under the impression – and this may be entirely my error, lord, for my understanding of the affairs of great men like yourself is sadly lacking – that you . . . that you wished to sack the northern city, to bring the Way of Falla to its people . . . To kill the heretic enemy and liberate the ill-used women . . .’ He paused, seeing his master’s eyes narrow dangerously. ‘As well as the Lady, of course . . .’ His voice tailed away to nothing. He knew himself to be in a perilous situation, and not just for raising this delicate point. He had not volunteered himself for this service but had been tricked into the castle and delivered to Tycho Issian by a man he had once thought a friend, who had sought to further his own dubious ends by providing the Lord of Cantara with an imaginative gift. Thus misrepresented, Plutario Falco found himself fatally compromised, for in truth he was no sorcerer but only a mere conjurer, a man who entertained at banquets with his neat sleight-of-hand trickery. He was an entertainer, a prestidigitator; a player of games. But unfortunately he had no genuine magical ability whatsoever. Or he would have used his skill to render himself invisible one minute after meeting this madman, escaped the city and fled for his distant island home as fast as his feet, or a magic carpet, could carry him.

  ‘The Lady is the key,’ Tycho said sharply. ‘Without her, the rest means nothing. If we take the Rose of the World and kill her consort, the North will fall to us. I know it.’

  Plutario silently cursed his stupid mouth. ‘Of course, my lord, of course. What know I of such matters? I am only a simple . . .’ he struggled for a useful description; failed. ‘Man,’ he finished lamely.

  ‘Indeed,’ the Lord of Cantara said distractedly. ‘Indeed.’ He paced the chamber, hands clasped behind his back. ‘Armies and herds of yeka and a thousand ships will avail us nothing. All I need is a little magic.’ He swivelled on his heel, fixed the cringing conjurer with a gleaming eye. ‘Surely that’s not too much to ask?’

  ‘No, my lord. Let me consult the alignments in my star-charts again to determine the optimum hour for such a venture . . .’

  Tycho Issian fixed him with a look so venomous that Plutario felt his knees go to water. After a pause which was pregnant with malice, the Lord of Cantara said quietly, ‘We shall expect a full demonstration of your skills tomorrow night, alignment or no alignment. Or I shall give you into the hands of Tanto Vingo for use in one of his experiments. From the look of you, you should burn long and slow, like tallow.’

  Alisha’s crystal had proved to be worth its burdensome weight. As if it had decided to adopt its new protector, it showed Virelai to a recent kill by desert cats – some large unidentifiable rodent left mauled and half-eaten among the rocks beneath a stand of flame-trees – and allowed him to channel a fire through its quartz heart with which to cook the thing. He had never been so ravenous. Or rather, he corrected his thought, he had never been ravenous at all. It was a delicious sensation, tearing into the seared flesh with his stomach rumbling away in anticipation of the feast, feeling the meat juices bursting on his tongue, dribbling out of his mouth. No sooner had he finished his meal than he remembered Alisha’s and the nomads’ refusal to eat the flesh of any other creature and felt abruptly ashamed. But he told himself that he had not caused the death of the creature he ate, and without it he might be near death himself, and by such persuasions soothed his qualms, though the memory of the delicious taste of the meat, so different to the wasted, sorcerous things the Master had magicked into existence to sustain them on Sanctuary, revisited him tauntingly for hours and days to come.

  The seeing-stone also showed him to an old well in which a battered leather bucket hung from a tattered rope and the water tasted fresh and sweet; it offered him landmarks he might guide himself by; and as the sun began to dip into a blood-red sky, it led him within sight of the Eternal City.

  H
ere, the crystal became stubborn, refusing to allow any glimpse of what might await him inside those rosy sandstone walls. Instead, it offered the deeply unsettling view of Rahe, Lord of Sanctuary, leaving his arctic stronghold with a dark man in a small vessel. Virelai watched this bizarre tableau with an icy hand around his heart. In his head he could hear the terns wailing their mournful cries, the distant roar of unseen waves. He remembered his own escape from the ice realm; and the circumstances in which he had left his erstwhile guardian. He recalled Rahe’s towering rages and his awesome powers, and in his head a single phrase repeated itself, over and over, a mantra, a warning, a harbinger of doom:

  The Master is returning to the world . . .

  He was coming back to Elda. He was coming to find his erring apprentice and exact his revenge, and with some strange man in tow who looked tough enough to twist Virelai’s head right off his shoulders.

  Virelai took trembling hands off the crystal and tried to think. What if it is not true-sight? Just a possible future, something that may never happen? It was a tempting evasion, but he knew, from the buzzing in his bones caused by the contact with the stone, that such was not the case.

  His immediate instinct was to flee south, to disappear into the desert, to make for the hills where he had been born, and hope to escape his fate. But that way lay Alisha and the deathstone and whatever horrors she awoke with it. He did not think he was strong enough in his mind to witness the raising of the dead. Although he might use the stone against the old man . . . But even as he considered this he knew he could never do it: in the presence of the mage he would become again the terrified child he used to be. And if the stone came to the Master’s hands, he would surely be obliterated.

  But if he ran away now, fled to save his own skin, what would become of Saro Vingo?

  He rolled the seeing-stone into the spill of cloth, confined it with a viciously tight knot and kept on walking north.