by Ed Greenwood
Russark frowned, considering matters.
The Count lifted one shoulder in a shrug and drawled, “Spurn me, and I’ll toss you out of this coach. I’m sure the hunting Harhoun will be merciful.”
Russark shook his head, thrusting forth one stump of an arm imploringly, then the other.
The Count let his shoulder fall and raised an eyebrow instead. “You accept?”
Russark nodded his head as firmly and fiercely as he could manage.
The Count grew a smile as cruel as any that the Markgrafina had ever given Russark. “I am pleased. So shall you be, I trust, in time soon to come.”
The rumble of the coach changed as they crossed an uneven wooden bridge. Then another.
“Down on the floor,” the Count commanded imperiously. “Keep still and silent.”
The moment Russark’s shoulders touched the floorboards, the Oporltan cast the blankets over him. Russark heard the coach door open and hurriedly shifted his arms to open a narrow gap between two blankets so he could peer out at the coach window. Through it, he saw the Count’s legs disappearing up onto the coach roof. It promptly creaked alarmingly twice or thrice as the nobleman did things overhead, then he moved forward, heading for the coachman’s high seat.
Almost immediately, someone shouted from the road ahead. The Count called to the horses, and the coach slowed abruptly.
More shouts. The border.
Here, Tarkania adjoined Sousarkania, and there were guards. The Sousarkans usually lounged on the balcony of their guardhouse with field glasses, looking down on the stretch of road lit by their lanterns. They had rifles ready at hand to deal with undesirables.
The Tarkanese, however, habitually stood in the road smoking and gossiping, waiting for travelers to stop and search. They were taking turns curtly commanding the Count to halt immediately as the coach slowly rumbled to a stop, the horses snorting and pawing.
Russark didn’t know what the guards would make of a man in a corset and garters who had no hands or tongue, but…
The Count called back cheerfully, telling them there were no passengers inside, only his bags “up here.” The roof creaked again as he climbed onto it.
“I’ll unlash everything,” he added, as heads wearing Tarkanian uniform caps appeared outside the coach window.
The sudden sharp crack of a pistol came from overhead, followed by another and another—flintlocks being discharged as swiftly as a man could aim one, drop it thudding onto the coach roof, and scoop up another.
The Count must have a ready-loaded arsenal up there.
The guard nearest the window fell from view, the one beyond fled with a ragged shout, and more firing came from overhead. Rifles, now—their boomings echoing back off the trees. Sousarkania was going to think an invasion was erupting over the border…
There was a brief scream and a fierce eruption of gunfire—a few shots from the guards and a brief storm of firings from the coach roof, then some faint crashes of someone blundering off into the trees. The Count drawled a curse and fired again. Once, twice…but the crashing continued, faint and far away now.
Silence fell, and the Count’s head abruptly appeared in the coach window, leaning down from above. He was wearing some sort of dark eyeglasses that covered all of his face above his nose. Spectacles all of one piece, and they glowed an eerie red around the edges, as if there was a glowing hearth inside them.
“One got away, as I’m sure you heard,” he informed Russark calmly. “Well and truly riddled, but these Harhoun are hardy devils. Get up and get comfortable—oh, and fire any of these I haven’t yet emptied out into the trees, right now.”
He started dropping armfuls of rifles, old muskets, and pistols of various makes in through the window. Russark burst up out of the blankets to wave his arms helplessly.
How can I fire anything? he tried to shout, but managed only an insistent gurgling.
The Count laughed bitterly and nodded. “My apologies, boy. Of course you can’t. Let’s have a look at them together. Quick, now. Give me any silver shot you find.”
None of the several dozen firearms proved to be unfired, and the Count commanded briskly, “Wrap blankets around them all to keep them hidden and stop any clattering and clanking. We’ll be getting well away from Tarkania now!”
Russark peered out the windows as the Count took the reins and got the unsettled horses moving again. Before the coach rattled very far, he saw that they were still well shy of the border—and that the Tarkanese guards sprawled everywhere had in death shrunken into wolves in ill-fitting human uniforms, tongues slack and dangling.
As they approached the border, the Count slowed the coach and busied himself tying something on the roof, and Russark thought it prudent to lie down and cover himself along with the pistols and rifles.
No shouts hailed them as they passed through the lantern-light of the Sousarkan border-post, and the Count didn’t even wave or speak. Soon they were out into moonlight, with farm fields spreading away on both sides of the coach as the Count kept the horses at a steady pace.
They rumbled a long way through Sousarkania, and at some point, Russark drifted off to sleep.
He awoke suddenly, drenched in sweat as he tried to shout, tried vainly to twist away as red-eyed wolves leaped for his throat from three sides at once, and—
There was silence around him, beyond the blankets, and no movement but a slight swaying. The coach had stopped.
The Count was down and doing something to make gates open in a tall, dark stone wall. Before Russark could get a good look, the gates swung wide and moonlight lanced out between them.
Then the coach was moving again, rumbling through the gates and up a sweeping drive through tall-treed gardens to a fortified manor house. Not as large or grand as Tark Castle, but much newer and more pleasing than that old fortress. This was a home.
The coach swept right past the mansion and into a dark yew tunnel, then rolled out into a small courtyard, turning sharply to pass along the back of the house, into…the yawning doorway of an attached stable.
It was very dark, and silent. The place seemed deserted—no servants, no grooms or hostlers hastening up, no beasts in any of the nearby stalls. Or at least that was the impression Russark got before the Count lit a lantern hanging from a nearby hook, swung open the coach door, and reached in a hand to help his new recruit out.
Russark accepted that aid silently, pretending not to see the gun held ready in the Oporltan’s other hand. The Count fetched down the lantern and guided his guest up some damp, narrow cellar steps.
Blankets, guns, and coach were all left behind. Halfway up the steps, Russark managed a look back—and saw the girl who’d met him in the river lying limp on the coach roof. She was lashed in place between the baggage-rails, nude and motionless, seemingly dead.
He turned to ask about this, but the Count was wearing a half-smile and said nothing at all. Russark frowned, opened his mouth, and…closed it again. He no longer had any way to quickly and clearly ask or demand anything.
Watching the Count of Oporlto smilingly adjusting his monocle, Galorn Russark decided to keep silent. For now.
Sliding past his own blade, the sword swerved to thrust ruthlessly at his belly.
Russark caught it calmly in his pincers, plucked it aside, and slapped his foe on the ribs with the flat of his shortsword.
Trask nodded and backed away, breathing hard. “W-well done, Savarich. Soon you’ll win every time.”
Savarich. Honored Sir.
Much better than Dead Man.
Russark scratched at an itch on his sword arm with the pincers adorning his other hand. The shortsword had the longest, tightest bracer of all his attachments, and it was chafing. No wonder; he’d been sparring hard for days now, taking heavy blows on many a parry.
Trask leaned back against the far wall, breathing hard.
Russark waited patiently, knowing his sparring partner would advance again when he’d got his wind back.
The Count had been as good as his word. Russark now had a dozen silver-plated attachments that slid onto his stumps and could be tugged tighter or looser by means of flanges he could bite: a hand that was a claw atop a metal tray, a pulley, the pincers, a clip for carrying parchment fitted with a clamp that held a quill pen—and, of course, the sword.
Trask was a stolid, slab-faced veteran of many informal wars before the Napoleonic campaigns. His chin had been scorched with a powder burn, and his face was adorned with several short white scars where swords had just managed to touch him in past battles. He was friendly enough, and had made Russark give him a solemn promise. If Trask was wounded during their practice battles, Russark was to carry him over to the man asleep on the bed in the corner, place Trask atop that sleeper so their bodies touched, then depart the training room, go down the passage, and wait in the first chamber on the left.
A simple pledge, but a curious one…yet Russark was learning patience. The Count answered questions in his own time and manner. Trask was a little more talkative, and now had his breath back.
“This game you’re joining is deadly, yes,” he said, resuming a conversation they’d begun half the day ago as if they hadn’t spent sweaty hours fencing back and forth across the windowless room, toughening Russark’s arm as the Tarkanese mastered his new blade. “Yet it is a fight we must win. The Markgrafina is only one of those we must stop. The other slavers are trying the same things she is doing. Kidnapping all those who invent things to win control of all new inventions.”
They saluted each other, crossed blades, then fell back into the skirling of thrust, cut, and parry.
“The more they get—these new things—the richer, more powerful they become,” Trask went on, sidestepping and launching a swift succession of wicked thrusts.
“Harder and harder it gets for governments,” he added, breathing harder now, “even for England, with its great navy…to have any hope of controlling the slavers, to defeat them in even one battle!”
Russark, who’d been parrying like a fury, got in a stop-thrust and almost managed a disarm; Trask acknowledged it with a nodding smile and added, “Once slavers have fleets of these sky-sailing ships, they can smuggle at will. Kidnap and assassinate, too! Drop teams of slayers out of the clouds by night, inside walls…onto roofs. Set buildings afire and force targets outside, steal from armories, snatch their own and those they favor out of prisons…all of that.”
Russark nodded. He’d watched the Wargallant scud overhead and foreseen those same perils clearly enough.
“Right now,” Trask added, pressing Russark back with a sudden flurry of lunges and sly, low cuts, “all that’s really holding back the slavers is the slavers themselves…as they fight each other. Now that she has the Wargallant, the Markgrafina and her weres are no longer a handful of backcountry wayfarer-snatchers to be sneered at. Now, she’s very likely to win out over every other slaver.”
Russark sprang back and struck a heroic pose.
Trask chuckled. “Aye. Unless you and your silver-plated sword can cut down most of the wisest weres, those of high rank and station. Or expose them for the monsters they truly are, for every eye to see.”
He advanced again, pressing Russark hard. Their blades struck sparks off each other as both men put weight and strength behind them. No blunt, dull-edged practice blades here, but steel that could slay in a swift, unguarded moment.
Trask tried another hooking cut around Russark’s shortsword, and Galorn parried it as easily as ever, shifting to keep his body behind it—a blade fitted to the arm loses the precision and freedom possible with a jointed wrist—and the scarred veteran lunged, low and fast.
His sword cut fire across Russark’s thigh, fire that blazed up into an icy numbness.
Frightened and then furious, Russark struck back, chopping twice at Trask’s sword arm, then twisting inside Trask’s reach as the man’s sword clanged away—and slicing his own blade across his opponent’s throat.
Too swift to think, to regret…
Trask just had time to stare pleadingly over the spraying blood as he went down.
A shocked Russark stared down at the dying man feebly trying to clutch his throat. So much blood…Then he remembered what he’d sworn to do. The man sleeping on the cot in the corner, who’d eerily never awakened no matter how loud and furious the ringing clangor of their swordplay…
He bent over, shortsword on one arm and pincers on the other, and scooped Trask up. The man was as heavy as he’d expected and blood was pumping out of him and pattering down everywhere, but a promise was a promise or Galorn Russark was nothing at all…
The passage was dimly lit by candle-lanterns hanging at intervals down its length, but the first chamber on the left proved to be dark, with no ready lamp that Russark could see. He stepped into its gloom and drew the door closed, keeping its latch gripped in his pincers, and leaned to listen intently for any noise beyond it.
He barely had time to fight his breathing back to normal before he heard someone step out of a room nearby and stride down the passage. He waited for the footsteps to pass, then eased the door open just enough to see who it was.
It was the sleeper from the cot.
Russark stole out into the passage after him like a swift, vengeful shadow. The man strode on, not looking back, and opened a door three down from Russark’s—all the doors looked alike, heavy panels lacking fanlights or adornment—and stepped into a lit room beyond.
Russark got a momentary view of someone’s booted feet lying on a cot in that room before the door closed.
Frowning, he retreated to his sanctuary, closed the door, and felt his way cautiously around what proved to be a small chamber furnished with a bed, a washstand, a rug on the floor, and a table and chair along the wall facing the bed.
He sat down on the bed, waiting—uncertain of what he was waiting for—and almost immediately heard the scuff of boots in the passageway.
The door was flung open, and bright, almost blinding lantern-light flooded the room. Behind it stood the Count of Oporlto. Russark knew there was a pistol in the nobleman’s hand before he saw it, but something more urgent caught his eye.
The Count’s boots.
They were the boots he’d just seen on the cot in the room the sleeper had entered.
“Accidents happen, boy,” the Count said quietly, sounding more sad than angry. “Come.”
Russark nodded assent and followed the Oporltan out into the passage and down the hall, heading deeper into the mansion. As they passed the door of the room that the sleeper had stepped into and from which the Count had obviously emerged, Russark flung it open and peered inside, keeping back so as not to block the light of the lantern.
The sleeper was lying face-down on the floor beside the now-empty cot, still and motionless as if dead. Russark let out a wordless growl of bewilderment and anger, and whirled to confront the Count, who was regarding Russark calmly.
“You were not supposed to see that, m’boy. Kindly refrain from burying your blade in me. This is…not what you think it is.”
Russark spread his arms, frowning in bafflement. So what is it, then? He couldn’t frame those words, however, and they came out more like, “Oh hrut isssz’tt, rhren?”
Yet the Count smiled thinly and nodded as if he understood perfectly. “The time has come…” He turned away down the passage, adding over his shoulder, “…to tell you some things.”
Russark followed. They turned a corner into a wider hallway, then passed through the second side-door in its left-hand wall and into a dark, richly paneled study.
The wall facing the door was covered with a huge, glorious color map of the known world. The other walls of the room were lined with bookshelves. In the center of the room stood a large table entirely covered with naval charts, their corners held down with decanters. There was a desk and some chairs beyond it, and a side table beyond that—and all of Russark’s attachments, freshly polished, were laid out on the side table.
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The Count went straight to them, took up the clip with the quill pen clamp, and slipped a freshly-cut quill into it. Stepping past Russark’s half-raised sword as if it wasn’t there, he took Russark’s pincers off his stump and settled the quill pen attachment in its place. Then he selected a decanter of fine brandy from the table, poured a glass for Russark, and settled it into the clip.
“To your better health,” he toasted Russark solemnly, filling a glass for himself and clinking the two together. Then he strolled away, coming to a stop before the huge map.
“I daresay little word of what Metternich, von Hardenberg, Nesselrode, and the rest have done to this map has reached your ears. The Duchy of Warsaw was shattered and handed out piecemeal, Saxony treated even worse, Hanover made into a kingdom…there’s now a Duchy of Lucca…”
He spun on his heel to face Russark, monocle gleaming. “Those who descended on Vienna to scheme seized the opportunity to redraw damned near every border they could. They’ve left thousands angry and confused, all across Europe. Anger the slavers will use to murmur their way into alliances, urge neighbor to seize hated neighbor and sell them into slavery, and worm their way into the confidence of dukes, kings, and princes.
“There are slavers almost everywhere in this ‘new Europe,’ some of them nobility who see their old power over the peasantry slipping away. Right now, and for some years to come, it is a time for the bold, the rogues, and the law of the sword, and no country can expect aid from outside its borders, only trouble. Everyone wants Tarkania’s flying ship, but no one cares a fig for Tarkania. So the Harhoun can do as they please, just as they have done for centuries.”
Russark frowned, spreading his arms in a silent question. The Count smiled.