Retribution (Drakenfeld 2)

by Newton, Mark Charan

  ‘At least no one can fire an arrow through a window.’

  ‘It is very difficult admittedly,’ Leana said, ‘when there are no windows.’

  Our new quarters were located somewhere under the royal palace. The stone walls, constructed from large limestone blocks, were little more than seven feet high. There were five rooms in all, each one of a similar size, yet decorated in a pleasant if garish local manner. Animal skins covered the couches and formed rugs, and crudely preserved heads had been mounted as trophies. There was a well-ventilated stove, wall hangings depicting scenes of the hunt, and a good dozen or so cressets lining the wall. When they had all been lit it wasn’t that dark at all. Two rooms acted as bedchambers, one was for dining or entertaining guests, and another – equipped with a desk, ledgers and lanterns – could serve perfectly as a base for our operations. The only way in was through a thick, arch-shaped wooden door.

  ‘It’s a vault,’ I said, ‘and it’s spacious. So there aren’t any windows. What is this place anyway?’

  Nambu Sorghatan, princess of Koton, and now – bizarrely – under our protection, answered in perfect Detratan. ‘It’s my mother’s emergency quarters.’

  ‘For use in . . . ?’

  ‘Sieges,’ Nambu said, sitting on one of the couches and leaning back on both hands. ‘Or if she thinks people are out to kill her.’

  ‘Does it happen often?’

  ‘Only when she’s paranoid.’

  ‘She doesn’t show much fear,’ I replied.

  ‘You get to see the queen. I get to see my mother,’ Nambu replied. ‘She also comes down here when she’s taking lovers.’

  Looking at Leana I raised an eyebrow.

  Leana smirked. ‘You wanted safety? You have found a love nest. A shame you never have anyone to romance.’

  ‘That may well be,’ I replied, ‘but it’s an improvement nonetheless. I imagine, decades ago, this would have been some sort of storage facility.’

  ‘Or a dungeon,’ Leana muttered.

  ‘Indeed.’

  Nambu was standing with her shoulders slumped and a resigned look about her. She did not seem petulant – as the offspring of royals could so often be. She appeared to accept whatever direction she was steered in, and it occurred to me that a royal life may not be entirely blessed – though it was a thousandfold improvement on the existence of most young people. ‘How many people know about this place?’

  ‘No one,’ Nambu said, ‘other than her two secretaries and me. Maybe one or two close soldiers, if she can trust them. Her lovers are blindfolded on their way down here. Probably after they’ve arrived, too.’

  ‘You take exception to your mother’s . . .’ I searched for the word, keeping in mind how young she was, ‘entertainments?’

  ‘Entertainments,’ Nambu grunted, stifling a laugh. She looked across to Leana. ‘Astran’s mercy – did he grow up in a monastery?’

  Leana addressed Nambu. ‘You know, I think we will get along very well.’

  ‘Well isn’t that nice,’ I said. ‘I’m glad ridiculing me might provide a common interest for you both.’

  ‘Relax, officer,’ Nambu said, reclining on her side on the couch, and staring into the empty fire. ‘Anyway, to answer your delicate question, I don’t really care what she does with her lovers.’

  ‘Well, she must care for you,’ I continued, moving around the other side of the couch to see her face, ‘in order to want you protected so badly.’

  ‘Hmm . . . She’s concerned that someone is going to take the throne. And I’m just something else for her to be worried about.’

  I wondered if Nambu might open up on an issue that had niggled with me since I’d arrived. ‘Do politicians thirst for greater glory?’

  ‘They probably do, what few of them there are.’

  ‘There are not many here?’ I asked.

  Nambu went on to reveal what I had suspected all along: that the political structure of the nation was anything but democratic. A handful of senators – mainly those with connections to the Sorghatan family – convened every new moon to discuss the affairs of the state. Mostly this conclave was made up of ranks of senators who were leading figures in rival clans – the Rukrid, Yesui, Tahtar and Jagats – and her mother had merely given them ceremonial roles to appease the embittered families. There was always the promise that one day they would receive more power, but it never came. Over the years the clans had become even more frustrated. Now and then these senators might put an issue or piece of policy forward to the queen, but she was someone who did things her own way and often ignored their requests. Those who sought any real power quickly disappeared.

  It would explain why I had seen so few politicians around the city. Yet it was important to bear in mind that Nambu was possibly jaded, happy to exaggerate her mother’s weaknesses to paint her in a bad light.

  It was getting late in the evening and we decided to head to our respective chambers. Leana and I would share the larger room, allowing Nambu her own private quarters.

  ‘Just so you know,’ Leana said, ‘at sunrise, we will be practising with the sword.’

  Nambu peered from behind her half-closed door and replied, ‘Sure. If you know when the sun has actually risen.’ And she closed the door behind her.

  Leana shrugged, turning to me. ‘The girl has a point. I will light one of these candles on the side and estimate how long has passed. It can also provide enough brightness for us to light the cressets in the morning. You will start to miss windows soon enough, Lucan.’

  Without the sounds of the city to disturb me, I suspected I would sleep well. There would be no carts grinding through the narrow streets. There would be no priests calling out through the night. There would be no fights breaking out. It would be blissful.

  I had taken the bed and Leana, as ever, had wanted to sleep on the floor. We would probably repeat this arrangement wherever we were travelling, no matter how much I argued otherwise. Not that I ever argued too strongly.

  ‘You have taken a bit of a shine to the young princess,’ I suggested, lying there in the dull light of the candle. ‘Forgive me for saying, but it doesn’t seem like something you’d normally be happy to do, yet you seemed keen to look after her.’

  Leana was silent in thought for a while, something which felt all the more profound down there, away from the hubbub of daily life.

  ‘I do not mind so much,’ Leana whispered in reply. ‘Because I remember what it is like to be a young girl who is out of her depth.’

  ‘You do?’ I sat up in bed.

  Leana looked uneasy, and then she said something surprising. ‘I was not always a warrior.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  Again, a lingering silence as Leana searched her mind for an answer. She was rarely in a rush to speak, but I could tell this was taking a lot of willpower. ‘I was once in a much higher station than I have previously let on.’

  ‘Go on . . .’

  ‘Before the wars, this is. Before all the killings had begun.’ She sighed. ‘Spirits save me, when I was a girl I was in a position in society much like Nambu’s. In fact, we are very similar. We were very similar, I mean to say.’

  Leana had never even hinted at this before. I had always assumed she was trained to be a warrior – and remained of the warrior class in her own culture – because that’s what I had inferred from her few statements on that period of her life.

  ‘Are you telling me that you’re Atrewen royalty?’

  ‘Not the most senior royalty, no. But of . . . significantly noble birth, it is safe to say. I suppose at one point towards the end, as my people were killed one by one, I became senior royalty, but that does not seem appropriate to consider. That time has long since passed. The spirits wish for me to walk other roads, and I have taken them. I am not unhappy with their wishes.’

  ‘But you always made fun of my relatively privileged upbringing,’ I whispered. ‘I just assumed you didn’t like people of higher birth.’

&
nbsp; ‘You never appreciated how lucky you were,’ she replied bluntly.

  ‘That isn’t true, Leana.’

  ‘I had my privilege destroyed. Not removed, but destroyed. Only when these things are gone do we appreciate them.’

  I let out a long breath. ‘You’re correct.’

  ‘What is more,’ she continued calmly, without a trace of bitterness in her voice, ‘I had to learn how to fight to get such privilege back. I had to train hard, and work hard, and commit myself to regain my dignity. Not that it mattered and not that I succeeded, but I did discover new things along the way and we must make the most of those discoveries. So yes, though Nambu has not been through any of what I have been through, I understand what it is like to be a young girl in a noble family, in a world where it is not so easy to be a woman as it is to be a man. Now, that is all I have to say on the matter. We must rest.’

  I lay back down, stunned by the revelation.

  Jewels

  The following morning – or what I assumed to be morning, judging by how much the candle had burned down – Leana’s confession still echoed in my mind. It was as if she had been living a lie to me all these years; though strictly speaking, she had not lied. She simply had not told me all the details. Instead, I had let my assumptions get the better of me, and allowed those errors to harden over time into a clay image of what I took to be the truth. I felt like some distant, secret admirer who, without truly knowing the subject of their desire, creates a story about them to fill the void of their longing.

  I was very annoyed with myself.

  Most of what I had known about her past was based on our first encounter. Understandably she had spoken little about it since then, and I had never thought it appropriate to enquire about such matters beyond what she was prepared to say. I would have liked to talk at great length and revisit her past – to understand who she really was before we met on that horrific day.

  Though she was still the same Leana – someone I could depend upon with secrets about my god-cursed seizures, someone whose sarcastic ways prevented my station in life getting the better of me, and someone who had saved my life on many occasions.

  I could not understand why she had not told me before. It was likely she was worried I would treat her differently. Just because she was not far from royalty did not make her any better or worse a person. It had no influence over her skills by my side, yet it had obviously shaped who she was today. There might be something else entirely behind her discretion, but it would probably take another few years until she decided to tell me.

  Putting those thoughts to one side, I lit the cressets and the other candles, allowing the queen’s ‘love nest’ to be seen in all its glory.

  Leana woke Nambu and the two soon began to practise sword combat. It was the first time Nambu had done anything remotely like this. At first the fragile frame of the girl didn’t seem to cope with even holding Leana’s spare blade.

  ‘What if I hurt someone?’ Nambu said, holding the blade with uncertainty.

  ‘A chance would be a fine thing,’ I remarked dryly from one of the couches. The look Nambu gave me then suggested that there was some considerable spirit within her.

  Leana was an incredible warrior and a superb teacher. She had helped refine my own skills over the years. Even after we battled petty criminals in the underworld of Venyn City, she would occasionally correct my technique and give me some inappropriately timed feedback. I watched her now in the light of last night’s revelation. A royal warrior educating another royal.

  Leana guided Nambu through some basic moves – how to hold the blade, footwork, posture and so on – and Nambu appeared to take to Leana’s brisk instructions with considerable promise. I cringed the first time Nambu was knocked to the floor – this was a princess in our protection, after all – but the girl simply brushed herself down and got back on her feet again.

  After the lesson I located suitable attire for Nambu from the belongings that the queen had sent down for her, in the end opting for a simple brown tunic, dark-grey cloak and military-style black boots – the garb of a boy. For the first time that she could remember, Nambu wore no make-up, did not style her hair as per the fashion and wore no jewellery.

  She told us it was rather liberating.

  We had managed to leave the palace at a decent hour. The sun had only just risen, so we had not yet lost much in the way of time. Being encouraged by the queen to not use the royal facilities, to keep Nambu’s new situation discreet, we dined out on cheap street food.

  In the shadow of a towering statue of Astran, the princess of Koton munched her way through a cheap pastry with remarkable gusto.

  ‘This stuff is so much better than what we get in the palace,’ she mumbled with her mouth full.

  ‘It’s probably not as good for your constitution,’ I replied.

  ‘Don’t care. Can we eat this all the time?’

  The three of us walked through the prefecture towards the market. I scrutinized the signs on the stores nearby, some of which were written in Detratan, others – which I had some trouble discerning – were written in Kotonese.

  ‘What are you looking for?’ Nambu asked, one of many questions that was about to come my way.

  ‘I’d like to locate a jeweller,’ I replied.

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘Because . . .’ I sighed. ‘You heard me discussing the murders with your mother?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘So you think you know all the details?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well you don’t. There’s something we didn’t tell her.’

  She gave me a look of smug satisfaction. ‘So this is a secret?’

  ‘Not exactly. I was merely . . . managing the information.’

  ‘It sounds a lot like a secret to me. What is it?’

  I reached into my pocket and pulled out the envelope containing the ring we’d found in the bishop’s mattress. I told her where we found it and of the similar stone in the missing amulet belonging to Grendor of the Cape. She examined it carefully before putting it back in the envelope.

  ‘So, in conclusion, the jewel could be important. But we don’t know what it is. And that’s why we’re here looking for a jeweller – to find out.’

  ‘Oh. I thought you agents and spy types got to kill people to get information.’

  ‘No. Well, sometimes she does,’ I nodded towards Leana, ‘but we generally try not to kill. Life is best preserved – there’s almost always a loved one who will be affected by the death, a life to be ruined. Take poor Grendor – his death has now left a wife in mourning and two small children without a father. Such an act is not to be done casually. It can echo down the years.’

  Nambu shrugged. ‘You must worry about these things when you get to your age.’

  ‘I’m not that old,’ I spluttered. ‘Besides, being young is important – you should be enjoying things at your age and not worrying about death.’

  She made a noise of dissatisfaction. ‘I don’t get to enjoy all that much, not with my mother around.’

  We followed the instructions of a passer-by to locate the nearest jeweller. Even though we kept to the woman’s directions, it was still some time before we managed to find the place.

  The shop was tucked down one of the older, more pleasant lanes of the city, one with cobbled surfaces and raised pavements that reminded me somewhat of Tryum. The frontage possessed no windows – or awning, since it was shaded by the surrounding buildings – merely a faded green sign with Vallamon’s Gems painted in a wonderfully esoteric script. Standing by the front door was a tall and muscular man, someone, by the look of him, who might have been familiar with military service. He wore a black tunic and heavy boots, and possessed a broad face, stubble and close-cropped black hair. The owner must have been doing rather well for himself if he could afford private security.

  ‘Good day, sir. I’d like to meet with Vallamon.’ I noted how the man stood with half his frame across the doo
rway, as if tempting people to try their luck.

  ‘Who’s calling?’ he grunted.

  ‘Lucan Drakenfeld, Officer of the Sun Chamber. We’re on urgent business sanctioned by Queen Dokuz Sorghatan.’

  ‘Who’re these two?’ With a tilt of his head he indicated Leana and Nambu.

  ‘My assistants.’

  ‘You need two assistants?’

  ‘Yes, I’m a rather busy man. So I’d appreciate it all the more if you hurried along and asked Vallamon if he’s free. This is the queen’s business.’

  His dark eyes were drawn to my Sun Chamber brooch, the gold star pinned to my breast. He nodded and turned inside. Muffled voices discussed our presence.

  A moment later and he stepped outside once again. ‘All right, you can go inside, one at a time. And you’ – he pointed towards Nambu, who froze looking up along his outstretched finger – ‘you keep your hands in your pockets at all times. We’ve had trouble with lads your age before. I broke the arm of the last one who tried to pinch something, then had their parents complaining afterwards. Law’s the law – you steal, we take it back in whatever way necessary. Saves us the bother of courts and having to pay lawyers.’

  I rested my hand upon his forearm and met his gaze. ‘He won’t be any trouble,’ I said firmly, ‘I give you my word.’

  He peered down to where I’d touched his arm and made it perfectly clear he didn’t appreciate the gesture, but he stepped aside and let us through.

  Vallamon’s Gems was extremely small inside – perhaps a twelve-foot-square room – and lit warmly by dozens of candles. There was a counter to our right, and to the left was a wooden wall containing hundreds of parchments, on which various ink sketches had been made. The remarkably intricate drawings were of different gemstones, ranging in shapes and sizes, as well as the silver or gold in which they had been set, and illegible writing surrounded them that may have been detailing the designs.

  From the workshop behind, a small man with slick black hair parted to one side stepped forward into the light.

  ‘Good morning,’ I said. ‘The jovial chap on the door said it was all right to enter.’