by Stephen Hunt
‘Yeah, heard about that one,’ said the sorcerer. ‘Hey-ho. You got to give it to their priests. Stupid, they aren’t.’
‘This is your doing!’
‘Kid, I warned you. There were other ways of getting you crowned high king that were open to us. The subtle kind: bribery, corruption, backroom shenanigans. Wizards like me, that’s where we do our best work. But oh no, you couldn’t keep it in your pants. You wanted the big dynastic marriage to Sibylla. Well, guess what, your highness, getting even against her ancestral enemies was the price for that sweet booty.’
‘You dare to talk about Sibylla like that…’
‘I hate to burst your bubble, boy, but your sweet girl is lining herself up a selection of nice rich Narvalak noblemen to seal her future with.’
‘Liar! They are blood enemies. Her council would never accept such a marriage.’
‘Don’t have lot of choice anymore. Sibylla owned one of the four armies that got iced last year, if you forgive the pun, remember? Oh, and the girl’s used the engagement ties between your country and hers to declare your ass dead while annexing your lands. Not too sloppy. Guess there’s more of her mother in her blood than I gave her credit for. That’s my way of saying she had me fooled too, not that it’s much consolation to you right now.’
For a second, Calder was almost mute with fury. ‘You oath-breaker, you lying, false—’
‘I’m sending you my apologies, my prince,’ shrugged the sorcerer. ‘Along with something a little more substantive. Sure as shizzle didn’t think things were going to pan out this badly.’ One of the eyes in the ghostly dark apparition winked at Calder. ‘Compared to you mayflies, I’m almost immortal. Think a man would have learned by now, right?’
‘My prince,’ hissed Noak, his eye pressed to a gap in the thatch. ‘Halvard’s people are outside.’
The evil witch-light winked out inside the hut, leaving Calder and his manservant alone again. His honour wasn’t armour; Noak wasn’t up to much in a brawl, so that just left the hunting dagger. Calder drew it out, keeping the bone handle tight against his sweaty palm. A hand’s length of steel, against what? Seven armoured men coming down the slope, large as trolls, swords sharp enough to slice ironwood. Killers all, rattling with blades and crossbow bolt bandoleers. Faces hidden beneath steel wolf masks riveted under their horned helms. As if they need to look any more fearsome given the size of them.
Noak still clutched the iron pan. It was just heavy enough to brain a man, if you got lucky. ‘My prince,’ he whispered. ‘If I’m favoured enough to be allowed to follow you into the Halls of the Twice-risen, will you grant me a boon?’
Calder nodded.
‘Pension me out of this job.’
‘Follow me out of this hut, and you’ll have earnt it.’
Calder’s plan started as he’d foreseen. Outside, the seven brutes piled down the slope and passed the oil derrick and the driller’s hut, intent on following the false trial of footprints in the snow left by Calder and his manservant. They didn’t bother checking the hut, and why would they? Nobody in their right mind was going to take on a company of shield-warriors. Was it Calder’s imagination, or were the two slaves outside walking the circle a lot slower now? He set that thought aside. He didn’t have time to be distracted by their silent toil. The hunters had kept their crossbows strapped and dangling from their armour. So, they weren’t about to shoot Calder down as he fled. This suggested that his treacherous ex-ally, Baron Halvard, had expressed a desire to have the notorious Prince Calder taken alive. Not out of any sense of mercy, but so that the dog of baron would have something more than a corpse to hand over to the enemy. A bad memory sprang forth. Outside the walls of Narvalo, the priests threatening Calder that unless he abandoned the siege forthwith, they were going to give him a criminal’s death tied to a stake, personally dipping him in tar and lighting the match. Yes, a living prince would be worth quite a lot to the Narvalaks. It wouldn’t matter if there were a blizzard pummelling their great fortress city, Calder could foresee standing room only in the large square outside their high temple.
Calder timed it just right, springing the door open a second after the hut fell out of sight of the fighters. Much to Calder’s surprise, Noak came sprinting right behind him, seemingly as eager as Calder to take the shield-warriors in the rear. Well, if the fighters planned on taking Calder alive to burn at the stake, Noak’s one chance of surviving was that the seven thugs would seize the manservant for the local slave market. On the baron’s lands, that would probably mean Noak ending up blind and tongueless as the third cog on a driller’s well. Not really living at all. Even as Calder closed the gap on the warriors, the snow muffling his boots, it was hard to know where to plunge his dagger. Somewhere between the round iron shield and the chainmail? Try to pierce the leather neck-guard hanging down from the back of the horned helmet? Back of the thighs? One up the ass?
His problem was solved when Noak brained one of them from behind and the remaining heroes suddenly became aware that maybe they should’ve checked the driller’s hut behind them after all. With one of their number collapsed forward, pole-axed by a first-rate head trauma. Calder shoved his blade into the exposed neck of the shield-warrior who’d whirled around to face him. The giant went down gurgling behind the metal facemask, no doubt a look of surprise on his face to match Calder’s shocked realisation that the shield-warrior had taken his dagger with him. Showing a little more foresight than his master, Noak tried to pull a loaded crossbow off his victim, right up until the second when one of the assassins shoulder-charged the manservant and sent him flying sideways.
Calder didn’t have the luxury of retrieving a weapon from his victim, as four of the baron’s bulls jumped over their comrade’s corpse and kept on coming at him. He back-pedalled, turned and ran, followed by the killers’ roars of fury. The young prince didn’t have their armour to slow him down. But then, he wasn’t running with leg muscles the circumference of a tree trunk and pursuing hungry unarmed prey, either. It took a lot to sweat in weather as cold as this, but Calder managed it, reaching the shadow of the creaking oil derrick a couple of steps ahead of his pursuers. He swivelled around desperately. To one side the two slaves were still blindly pushing the rotation wheel. He lunged for the wooden measuring stick half-covered in tar and held it up, a blunt useless spear against the five giants closing in on him. They still hadn’t drawn their crossbows, leaving Calder to face a thicket of sword points and axe heads pointed in his direction.
‘Come on, lads. You can let me go. I’ll make it worth your while. Just see me back to my side of the border and there’ll be more silver in it for you than you’ll earn in a lifetime of humping for the baron.’
‘Careful, your highness,’ one of them laughed, breathing hard, ‘you strike me with that pole and you’re going to leave an oily scratch on my tunic.’
‘Do the smart thing,’ pleaded Calder.
‘You think that free you’re good for more than a farthing back home?’ sneered one of the men. ‘Only way your hide is worth anything is the baron’s blood price on you. We toss you across the border, the only people getting rich are the soldiers serving in what used to be your army. Except it isn’t anymore, is it? Heard it belongs to your bitch now, except she ain’t even that, is she?’
Calder waved the measuring stick menacingly, but it only made the shield-warriors laugh harder. ‘You don’t get to talk about Sibylla like that. She’s a highborn and you’re lowly pack rats not fit to stand sentry on her door.’
‘Are you really going to make us work for this?’ growled one of the shield-warriors, shifting the axe he held between his hands. ‘Baron wants you back for the fire, but nobody said anything about you needing to have your wedding tackle attached when we hand you over.’
‘Work for this?’ Calder glanced back to where Noak lay prone in the snowdrift, his ribs being kicked by the same shield-warrior that had shouldered him down. ‘If it’s a blade or kindling that’s on offer, you br
aves better practice your sales pitch.’
A low hissing noise sounded behind Calder. What the hell’s that? One of the warriors made to move forward, but his colleague halted him. ‘Stomped, not sliced. He’s got to walk back on his own feet. I’ll be cursed if I’m carrying him all the way to the castle.’
The hissing was louder now and it suddenly occurred to Calder what else sounded like an ice snake homing in on a man’s heat. He hurled the oil-measuring pole forward like a javelin, glancing off the metal mask of the shield-warrior in front of him. The distraction only lasted a second, but it was long enough for him to turn and start running up the slope without one of the shield-warriors cutting out his hamstrings with their blade. Calder had put maybe five feet behind him when the oil well exploded. That was what Calder’s canny old retainer had been doing when the prince had snowballed his back. Shutting off the valve to the well. But the driller’s slaves hadn’t known. They had still been walking their circle, slower and slower, building up pressure. Pieces of machinery scythed out, cutting down half of the baron’s killers, the derrick replaced by a fountaining black gusher spewing oil over the virgin snow. Incredibly, the two blind slaves had escaped the explosion. They were still walking the circle, except their walk was now a sprint, the well’s wooden beam unattached from its pumping mechanism. Two of the shield-warriors came to their feet, distinctly unamused by the devastation wrought on their friends. Calder kept scrambling up the slope, but a crossbow bolt took him in the back of the left leg, a stream of intense pain as he collapsed down to the snow, screaming.
‘Baron’s going to be disappointed,’ yelled one of the shield-warriors, pulling back the lever on his crossbow. ‘But we don’t need his blood money that much.’
Not as disappointed as me.
The giant’s comrade yelled up the slope as he ploughed through the snow. ‘Reckon we’re going to have to tar and light you up here, boy, now that you’ve struck black gold.’
Calder moaned, unable to crawl further. He stared up at the pale silver sky, pregnant with snow clouds. Far above, a pair of black dots circled. Crows from the Halls of the Twice-born, sent to seize his soul in their claws, to carry a dying prince back to his ancestors? Calder clutched at his burning, useless leg, trying to staunch the blood pumping out across the cold hillside. The blood was his oil. Pumping, pumping. Then the nearest black dot spat out a bolt of thunder and it slapped into the slope, exploding with a hundred times the power of a trebuchet, rock and frozen dirt showering down across his head. Another spit from the crow, then another, in quick succession, Calder’s ears hardly heard the thunderclaps through the smoke and fury. Breaking through the cloud of vaporised stone and steaming snow, the distant dot emerged. Not a crow, but a flying black monster with two wheels captured spinning inside its body, dragon’s breath hazing furiously out of its rear.
Calder shouted up at the flying monster, but his ears rang deaf and the words only sounded in his mind. ‘Are you the Hall’s crow, are you the—?’
A twin of the ebony-coloured beast emerged out of the cloud of carnage, Noak’s prone body clutched by six insect legs, putting the creature’s monstrous size into true perspective. Hell’s teeth, it’s going to feed on him! These monsters were bigger than any insect Calder had ever seen, even out in the hell-haunted wastes where he’d ventured with his crew and schooner. A decapitated arm still clutched a great sword less than a foot from Calder in the snow. Calder rolled over to the limb, prizing open the cold pale fingers, stealing the sword and thrusting the blade up uncertainly towards the creatures. ‘Come on, you great ugly dung beetles. I’ve fought armies and killers. I’ve battled creatures out on the sea flows that make you look like lantern flies. I am holding your fate in my hand.’
Hovering almost soundlessly, the closest flying beast opened a red eye, painting Calder’s chest with a warm red cross. ‘The evil eye, is it?’ He puckered a kiss up towards the monster. ‘Come on, you bloody demon, you’re boring me to death down here.’
It’s kissed him back, the sharp nick of a something flying through the air almost too fast to follow and slapping into his chest. He looked down dumbly at the tiny needled tooth embedded in his tunic. He laughed. Calder had taken worse sled splinter scratches on his hands. Then the young prince experienced the novelty of ninety thousand volts of electricity coursing through his muscles. After that, Calder didn’t feel much at all.
***
It came as a considerable surprise to Calder that he was actually able to open his eyes. Every muscle in his body felt as though he had been expertly filleted, dragged out of his flesh, and run through a mangle before being carelessly shoved back inside his carcass. Groaning and trying to hold down the vomit inside his gut, he opened his eyes. I might have known. Standing in front of his cot with arms on both hips, studying Calder’s agony, was that useless wizard, Matobo the Magnificent.
‘Those flying fire beetles were yours?’ asked the prince.
‘Don’t be overwhelming me with your gratitude, boy,’ said Matobo. ‘There were another two companies of the baron’s guardsmen fast on the heels of those pretty boys I saved you from.’
‘Saved me? I feel like I’ve been fried in whatever corner of hell you summoned that pair of flying monsters from.’
‘I had to put the zap on you and your friend. Those stretcher legs on my… flying beetles, weren’t going to hold your weight so good if you took in your mind to start struggling.’
Calder tried to sit up. He stared out of one of the room’s narrow stained glass windows. It looked like the capital outside. Late evening. I’m home. ‘Am I inside your tower?’
‘Where else? My pets landed you and Jeeves down here yesterday. You’ve been sleeping for a while now. You don’t need to worry about any of the commanders in what used to be your army coming knocking for you, though. I implanted a false memory inside the mind of one of the shield-warriors who wasn’t turned into a Roman Candle by your exploding oil well gag. After I put a match to the oilfield, I left him thinking you and Jeeves were crispy critters.’
‘Who is Jeeves?’
‘Your family retainer, boy.’
‘Noak. He’s alive too?’
‘Yeah, I was feeling generous. Man works for me, he gets free medical.’
Calder’s hand snaked down to his leg. The trousers had been removed along with his tunic, and he was wearing a white dressing gown cut from a material that seemed impossibly light and soft, yet as warm as a bearskin jacket. And even more impossibly, his leg seemed in perfect working order. The skin where the crossbow bolt had slammed through muscle and bone was red and itched slightly, but apart from that, as good as new. He touched his chin. Someone had shaved him. An expert barber too, his cheeks felt as clean as a babe’s. ‘By the gods, does your sorcery know no bounds?’
‘Oh, I’m just full of tricks.’
‘A pity you don’t have a poultice capable of healing wounds without leaving my head feeling like hell’s own hangover.’
‘That’s the effect of a different potion you’re feeling, nothing to do with your injuries. Just a little something to help you on your way.’
Calder felt a shiver of fear as he noticed the wizard’s familiar – a large black hunting hound – slip through an open door into the stone bedchamber. Whenever some fool called into question Matobo’s mastery of sorcery, the wizard mumbled a spell over his dog, and then the hound would speak, conversing with doubters as if the animal was human. Calder had seen such magic many times with his own eyes. Matobo would then smile menacingly as he informed a sceptic that the hound had once been a merchant who had cheated him, and explain how he turned the trader into a dog for the crime. It wasn’t a trick of ventriloquism, either. The wizard could walk miles away, and the cursed dog would still plead with you to save it from its evil master.
‘You can keep on feeling generous, wizard. I’m going to need your sorcery to sneak me into the palace, and then I’m going to carve out the skull of every member of the Privy Counci
l that supported my removal.’
Matobo sighed. ‘Magic I may be, but suicidal I ain’t. Every nation on the continent knows that you’ve been removed from the throne, and there’s no spell of forgetfulness big enough to fix that. A few palace guards I can handle, the army of mercenaries and foreign shield-warriors your princess has brought to the party is another matter.’ He turned to his familiar. ‘Bring my friends in.’ He gazed down at Calder as the hound trotted obediently out. ‘I’ve got alternative arrangements for you. I’m going to send you to a place where the price on your head won’t mean a whole lot. As you might imagine, that’s pretty damn far away.’
‘This is where I was born, this is where I will die,’ Calder insisted. ‘It is my birthright. Sibylla will see me. She’ll help me regain my throne.’
‘You think so?’ He rummaged around in the pockets of his purple robes, digging out a tiny globe the size of a marble.
‘Is that your crystal ball? It looks too small to scry into the future.’
Matobo grunted. ‘Even better. This toy shows you the past, kid. At least, it does when it scurries into the right room and its cameras are working properly.’
He mumbled something at the globe and it unfurled legs, turning into a spider-like creature. The little metal beast flexed its pincers, rising up on its hind legs, as if begging Matobo the Magnificent for food. The wizard whispered at it again. ‘Sibylla surveillance file. Six days ago. Her bedchamber.’ At his command a flat square of light formed above the spider, little black lines flickering down the brightness until a picture appeared, like some priest’s illumination on parchment. It was a perfect picture, though, capturing Sibylla’s gorgeous flawless skin as if Calder were spying on the scene through a keyhole. Sadly, the flawless picture came with perfect sound too. Sibylla was naked and writhing in the arms of someone else he recognized, the High Marshal of the Narvalak army. If it’s a pardon she’s earning, she needn’t enjoy it so much.