by Stephen Hunt
‘I have no place, either,’ said Kerge. ‘Perhaps we are all exiles, now.’
‘I follow my honour,’ said Sheplar, a touch too proudly for his reduced circumstances.
What fools these Rodalians are. Stubborn as the goats that climb their mountains, and about as attractive. ‘Find me a knife and I will follow mine,’ said Cassandra.
‘If I see you try,’ said Sheplar, ‘you will hear a yell as if my ancestor’s spirits have breached the earth.’
I’ll bear that in mind, if it comes to it. ‘If you will not help me, then leave me be.’
‘What makes you think we can escape?’ asked Sheplar.
‘I have seen the eyes of your slinking dog glinting in the dark as it prowls around the camp,’ said Cassandra. ‘It is not a wolf, although it looks as large as one. A wolf would attack the picketed horses at night. You used a scent hound to track me, didn’t you? And the creature is still on the loose, following us. It is clever and well disciplined. Perhaps clever enough to slip in one night when the guards are asleep and chew through your ropes?’
‘You have seen nothing but a hungry grass leopard, bumo,’ said Sheplar.
‘I have lost the use of my legs, mountain man, not my mind,’ said Cassandra. ‘My house’s hold, the Castle of Snakes, boasts high walls patrolled by guards with hounds every bit as loyal and wily as your dog. I can tell the difference between a leopard and a mastiff well enough.’
‘Believe what you will.’
‘I will not tell the nomads,’ said Cassandra. ‘You thought you were tracking me to save me. But nothing can do that, now. Leave with your spiky friend. But do not try to take me with you.’
‘These nomads are not a people to trust,’ said Sheplar.
‘I trust them to grow bored with me,’ said Cassandra. ‘And I trust their witch rider to end me sooner or later.’
‘There are no good ends out here.’
‘I will take an honourable one,’ said Cassandra. ‘And I have seen enough of those to know they are never easy.’
Sheplar shook his head sadly but kept his peace.
Cassandra slumped in the saddle. I wonder if I will have my legs returned to me when I am reunited with my ancestors? It seemed likely. No daughter of the empire would wish to exist for eternity as they were when they died an old crone. A pity that there were no priests of the Imperium Cosmocrator here to ask; although their answers, in Lady Cassandra’s experience, were suspiciously close to what the celestial caste desired to hear. Of course the emperor is the highest of the gods; he deserves your fealty, as does your house from those you shepherd.
They rode for another four days, a slow but relentless pace every day until it was too dark to see the ground, making camp in the deep of night. This was the riders’ way in winter. During the summer, they switched to travelling by night and resting during the baking heat of the day. After staking the horses and penning their sheep and goats, the nomads established a circle of dome-like tents, circular frames quickly set up with wooden poles unpacked from their saddle bags, woollen and sheep-hide felt stretched over as the tents’ skin. Each dwelling became a wheel-like home, exterior and interior both coloured with stitched patterns representing the six elements of life: fire, water, metal, wood, earth and flesh. The hide fabric also contained leering gargoyle-like visages of their gods, each heathen deity remade as an abstract symbol. Alexamir would appear in the evening and point them out to Cassandra, naming the gods and explaining their place in the Nijumet pantheon.
‘Why do you bother to carry me with you?’ asked Cassandra one evening, huddled under the warmth of a pile of blankets. It doesn’t matter how many blankets I cover my legs with. They always feel cold now. She shivered constantly; perhaps it had something to do with her injury. ‘Does your oath mean so much to you?’
‘My golden fox is still my golden fox,’ said Alexamir, squatting by her side inside the dome-like tent. ‘Even with her feet caught in a jaw-trap.’
‘If a horse was as lame as I, you would say a prayer, slit its throat and cook it.’
‘I do not think you will taste as good as horse steak,’ smiled Alexamir. ‘But perhaps when we reach the clan, they can find the salt to season you?’
‘I see my fate in your people’s eyes,’ said Cassandra. ‘In your witch rider’s.’
‘Nurai glares at everyone the same. She has a sour disposition. It is my eyes you should look at,’ said Alexamir.
‘Why do you take me with you?’
‘When you know the answer to that, you will know where you belong.’
‘I belong nowhere. I am not one of your riders. At home, I would be the shame of my house. I am no longer even a useful hostage for my enemies.’
‘This one,’ said Alexamir, tapping one of the symbols on the tent’s circular wall, ‘is the god of the grass, Atamva. His is the saying “Atamva always remembers”. It is taught that winter comes when Atamva forgets his love for his wife, the moon goddess Annayla. Spring is when his love stirs, and summer when he truly remembers his love. Atamva always remembers. This is your winter, golden fox. If Atamva can remember, you shall remember where you belong too.’
‘You are insufferable.’
‘Does that mean that Alexamir is faster and stronger and more daring than all lesser men?’
‘No, it means you have the sense of a horse.’
‘Good,’ smiled Alexamir. ‘Horses are far cleverer than they look. They can find hidden water where a man will die thirsty, and understand enough serpent speech to know where a viper is hiding in the grass ready to strike.’
‘Your insufferability stands, but perhaps I was overstating your good sense.’
Alexamir leant across and kissed her, the first warmth she had felt all day. Cassandra would have resisted more, but she could barely even roll out from under her blankets. And I need the heat, surely I do. She was drawn to it, despite her best intentions, like a moth to the camp fire’s light and heat outside. ‘How can you still want me?’
Alexamir got to his feet and bowed towards her before he exited the tent. ‘Dwell instead on how could I not?’
Despite herself, Cassandra felt a twinge of regret as the warrior departed. You are a fool. So grateful for kind words that you can find false affection in your heart for anyone who speaks them to you. How far had she fallen? Atamva always remembers. Cassandra rubbed her cold, dead legs. And how can I ever forget this? A useless weight, worse than any slaves’ chains.
Their journey continued each day, much the same as the last, save for a couple of nights when a pack of hill wolves started trailing the column across an undulating expanse of land the nomads called the Copper-barrows. There were too many riders during the day for the wolves to muster the courage to attack, and at night the camp fires burned and held them back, fear of bush fires greater than any hunger they might feel. Cassandra heard a fierce howling one night, and after that she no longer glimpsed the scent hound she suspected belonged to her would-be rescuers. The wolves had claimed their meal and slunk away to leave the nomad party unmolested. The sad look on Sheplar’s face the next morning confirmed her suspicions. The aviator’s last hope of rescue had vanished, too, along with his luckless dog.
Every evening Alexamir appeared in her tent and attempted to amuse Cassandra, make her forget her broken body and pointless existence. Briefly, she might succumb to the diversion. But each morning she awoke, forgetting who and what she was, until she first attempted to stand. Then her misery would come bursting upon her with all the fury of the flood waters of a broken dam. She came to depend on his evening visits, even as she loathed her weakness for doing so. Was there ever so ill-fated a match? A daughter of the mightiest imperium on Pellas and a ragtag rogue with barely a saddle and steed to his name. Except she was no longer the granddaughter of an emperor. She was an end without the knife to bring it about; dishonour awaiting a blade. She came to despise herself for the eagerness she felt when Alexamir arrived to talk with her. Lying there, trembling for
his presence. The anticipation, followed by sorrow when he departed. Worst of all was when he left for a day or two to hunt wild steers with a few others, ranging off before returning. What am I doing here? Why am I thinking about him so much?
Hers was a strange, intense sort of freedom. Exactly what the nomad had promised when he talked wildly about the joys of life with the Nijumeti, apart from the fear and bitterness of her crippled future. Cassandra had been raised on a merciless schedule without a free second to her name. When she hadn’t been training in armed and unarmed combat, physical skills of balance and poise, she had her nose pressed to books under the tutelage of the great Doctor Horvak, or was shadowing her mother to learn the duties of leading the house – commerce and trade, strategy and politics, ploys and scheming in the imperial court. Now the weeks were hers to do nothing but live and wander, without much purpose, without any hope. What’s the use of being free without ambition or merit? At least with a schedule from dawn to dusk, my place was certain. I was what I did. What do I do now? Push on, broken. She did. She had no choice.
When they finally reached the main body of the clan, the meeting was almost unexpected; such had been the slow drift of the days and Cassandra’s life. Oddly, the journey’s sudden end was the least of her surprises. They rounded a low rolling hill and Cassandra found a number of things before her that she had certainly never expected to see of a Nijumeti clan. From the gasp of shock from Sheplar Lesh and Kerge, mounted pillion to her right, what lay before them was obviously a revelation to them too.
A laugh rang from behind them. Nurai. ‘There,’ smirked the witch rider, cruelly, ‘did I not say you would see what we have become …’
FOURTEEN
TO KILL A PRINCE
Assemblyman Gimlette raised a glass of wine in his fat fingers while Thomas Purdell lifted his own, content to listen to the plump politician fill the air with bluster. Nobody had noticed that the main beneficiary of Thomas’s glass was the spittoon behind his divan. The windows of the prince’s quarters held the reflection of fireworks in the glass, a distant sound of cheering and singing from the streets of Midsburg. This is a triumph, fat man. But the rebels outside are cheering for the wrong side.
‘I told you, Your Highness, Charles T. Gimlette is just the man to bring you victory, and may this be the first of many.’
‘We need victories on the field as well as on paper,’ said Prince Owen from the divan opposite the politician’s seat. He raised a glass to Thomas and the assemblyman. ‘But I am grateful to you both for this. The assembly had been arguing about whether to offer peace terms before you escaped, but your testimony concerning my uncle’s crimes has stiffened their backbone.’
‘Bad Marcus dissolving parliament should have been sufficient warning of his intentions,’ said Anna Kurtain. She was sitting next to the prince, her face as worried and furrowed as always.
‘Ah, assemblymen, they love to bicker,’ said Gimlette. ‘That they do. Not all of my brothers and sisters in the party are for such decisive action. But you can count on me to herd them towards the right decision. You are Prince Owen no longer, sir. You are King Owen of Weyland, and we will bend our knees to you.’
‘I won’t be crowned a king until the usurper languishes in his own dungeon,’ said Owen. ‘And I will be King of the Weylanders, not King of Weyland. It is not I who has been elected sovereign, but the constitution. There will be no more prefects by royal appointment. Only the assembly and a lawful monarch governed by our laws. Never again will any citizen of this realm have to suffer from an unfit monarch’s whims.’
Thomas ignored the nobleman’s whining rebel treachery. He got to his feet and walked over to the table to lift the wine decanter, using it to refill the glasses of the assemblyman, prince and his woman. The only people who weren’t drinking were the two sentries standing sentry inside the double doors to the prince’s apartment. Loyalists, just like the soldier holding on to the reins of four fast steeds outside the mayor’s mansion. They’d be back in the south soon enough, escaping the siege at Midsburg before the town was cut off.
‘With such freedoms to lift our sails, the party will never let you down, Your Highness,’ drawled the assemblyman. Gimlette started to raise his fat hand in toast again, but the glass began trembling and he stared at it as though bewitched by the contents suddenly spilling across his wrist. Prince Owen had stopped pontificating too, his head falling against the leather of the divan and shaking madly as though in a fit. Assemblyman Gimlette attempted to stand, but he collapsed back, his heavy arms raised high as though in prayer, then slumped sideways, drool foaming across the seat.
‘Run for the garrison—’ snarled Anna Kurtain swaying up, but she dropped to her knees as she lost her footing, ‘—doctor.’
‘Did you hear something?’ laughed one of the sentries.
‘Not me,’ said the other. ‘Must be all that larking outside, I reckon.’
‘What is this?’ croaked the bodyguard, clutching at her throat as she tumbled off her knees. Kurtain lay sprawled across the room’s carpet, her hands twitching as she vainly attempted to move them towards her holstered pistol.
‘Tincture of Belladonna,’ announced Thomas, brushing his trousers as he stood up. Anna Kurtain had lasted a little longer than the fifteen minutes it should have taken from the first toast to paralyse her. The benefits of her size and muscles, no doubt, just like the fat fool’s cushioning. ‘Strong enough to make granite of your flesh for the rest of the hour. It’ll deaden your feelings, but not enough, I fear, to completely banish the pain of what this wicked pretender is about to do to you.’
Kurtain just managed to croak assassin, before Thomas’s poison fully froze her throat.
‘More of a torturer, usually,’ said Thomas. ‘I regret, sweet lady, that expediency requires I forgo my exquisite craft tonight.’ Thomas walked across to the king’s treasonous nephew, sprawled on the divan, and lifted the royal’s dagger from of his belt, inspecting its keen edge with interest. ‘You see, you’ve just presented the pretender with the shocking news that the Army of the Boles has crossed the river at Humont and is advancing on Midsburg. You and the good assemblyman tried to talk Owen out of abandoning the city and fleeing east like the coward he is. But the pretender took your advice as badly as your news.’
Thomas walked across to where the assemblyman sat slumped, eyes frozen wide and startled inside Gimlette’s heavily jowled face. He drew the blade across the assemblyman’s throat, stepping aside as a jet of blood spurted across the carpet. A vicious kick of Thomas’s boot sent the politician tumbling off his seat and into the floor’s embrace. ‘Calling for the true king’s death? You signed your own death warrant today, Gimlette. Along with everyone else sitting in your rebel’s parliament. How strange, I was certain it’d be hot air that escaped your foul fat neck, not blood. It’s the only surprise I ever had from you … everything else you did was so entirely predictable.’
Thomas clutched the king’s dagger and crossed to where the woman lay trembling on the floor. There he plunged the dagger deep into her chest, being careful to avoid the heart and leaving the blade’s hilt embedded inside her. Even paralysed, her face contorted in agony. So beautiful. And so little time to play. Thomas unholstered the bodyguard’s pistol and tucked it behind his own belt. A memento of this moment he would be sure to treasure. He signalled the two sentries. ‘Carry her to the bed chamber and toss her across the mattress. Make sure she bleeds copiously across the sheets. I want a nice dramatic death scene for the servants to discover tomorrow morning when they arrive to empty the fireplace. After you’re finished with her, come back and help me hoist the pretender’s flag.’
‘Sir.’ The soldier kicked the politician’s prone body as he passed it. A river of blood soaked the carpet around Gimlette. Thomas trusted it wouldn’t leak through the floorboards and bring the staff up early. ‘This one doesn’t just eat like a pig, he bleeds like one too.’
‘Leave him,’ said the other sentry. ‘
He’s filling his face in hell now, right enough.’
Thomas watched in satisfaction as the soldiers dragged the dying bodyguard into the adjoining rooms. He ripped a cord from the curtains alongside the window, flexing it between his hands. Fine thick knotted cotton. A balcony lay beyond the cold pane of glass, a view of the city stretched out in the flicker of lamp light and fireworks. He slipped the rope around the pretender’s neck and tied into a neat noose while the prince glared hatred up at him. Too late, my treacherous friend. The truth always appears too late. Thomas smiled back and patted the pretender’s cold cheek. ‘I can see the disgrace now, killing your woman and the fat man for daring to bring you the truth. Don’t worry; your dishonour will be banished soon enough. Along with the last flickers of your failed rebellion. My two friends here will travel south and inform the news sheets all about your double-murder and shameful suicide. Their distress when Miss Kurtain arrived with the news of the southern advance. How the men heard a struggle and had to break the doors in. Your guards discovered you dead, your friends’ corpses scattered around you, before they fled the city for failing in their sworn duty. You’ll be remembered as a slaver and a coward who led the nation into destruction, following his mad ambitions. How do you think scholars will record you in the annals of history? Insane Owen, the one-day king, the pitiful pretender? You won’t care after you’re in the dirt with the worms, I know. But I’ll peruse those books. When I’m an old man. I’ll read about you and remember the fine sight of your boots jerking as my men tug on your feet to finish you off. It’s not every day I get to watch a prince hang, even a treacherous pretender like you. How well do you think the king will reward me for this night’s work? I’ll live like a prince, I reckon, for executing one.’
Thomas’s soldiers returned, the pair’s grey uniforms stained crimson with the woman’s blood. Well, they’ll be turning those coats for the blue soon enough anyway. ‘She’s not dead yet, I hope?’