by Stephen Hunt
‘The baron has promised the priests they’ll be given the prince alive,’ said the High Marshal. ‘I can have the boy brought here for you to see, if you want.’
‘Why would I want that?’ asked Sibylla. ‘Your cardinal wants Calder for burning. It’ll be quicker if you ship him straight back to your country. Bringing him into the capital will only encourage any dissidents left alive. Let Calder’s future be written across the sea and out of sight of our peasants here.’
The high marshal scratched his naked scarred ass. ‘I thought you might want to slip him a vial of poison for old time’s sake. In my land his end will not be quick, not that which a warrior deserves.’
‘The cardinals will hardly trust me if I can’t even send them a single deposed royal. You told me the church values competence above all.’
The soldier stroked Sibylla’s spine as he shrugged. ‘As you wish.’
Calder’s fist punched through the scene, the hairs on his arm painted with the light of his now definitely ex-fiancée’s coupling as the conversation died away to be replaced by moans of pleasure. ‘Make it stop.’
‘I warned you,’ said the sorcerer. ‘When you lit out of here with your army and your fleet, you weren’t going to war, you were creating a vacancy. And nature does so abhor a vacuum. Especially when it’s the nature of a perfect pampered princess.’
‘Has your Seeing Eye truly shown me the truth?’
Matobo pushed the spider into a tiny sphere and tossed it to him to catch as if it was a child’s marble. ‘The kind of truth that opens your eyes. Guess this game hasn’t worked out for either of us.’
‘You still have your powers and position,’ said Calder, bitterly. ‘What am I left with? Ashes and the taste of mud in my mouth.’
‘If it’s any consolation, I am going to have to pack up here too. Leastwise, out of your country. It’s getting mighty tiresome scraping your ex-girlfriend’s assassins off my courtyard every morning.’ Matobo wiggled his fingers mysteriously. ‘And who knows, sooner or later one of those suckers might get lucky. And as someone a lot wiser than me once said, old Matobo’s going to have to be lucky all the time. Sibylla’s friends only got to get lucky once.’
Calder managed to push himself up and stay sitting on the cot, gathering the sheets around his body. ‘There is nowhere so distant that it will be out of reach of Narvalak’s fleet.’
‘You’ll be surprised. I got me a friend with a real special schooner.’ Behind the wizard, the door opened, two people entering the bedchamber along with the wizard’s canine familiar. One of them was a woman, every bit as handsome as Sibylla, although in the newcomer’s case, the princess’s pert superiority had been traded for a round-faced curiosity. The woman was not richly dressed. A single-piece green suit that looked like a washerwoman’s overalls, marked with an oval heraldic emblem on her shoulder, the garment’s material stiff and strong like sail fabric. Her companion, though, was a true oddity. Tall and spindly, he wore an identical set of overalls covering metallic gold skin, as if he’d been gilded as a babe in the precious metal. His face appeared noble and slightly pained, with an exotic cast about it that went beyond the sheen of his golden skin. Even queerer was his hair – not hair at all, but a close brush of wire, also gold, like a plate-armoured knight wearing a moulded helm.
‘This is the man?’ asked the woman in a low, smoky voice.
‘Prince Calder Durk,’ said the wizard. ‘Meet Lana Fiveworlds, captain of that special schooner I was telling you about. Her friend is Zeno, works as the first mate on said ship.’
‘You want me to take passage with a female master?’ spat Calder in disbelief.
‘Stow that shizzle,’ advised the wizard. ‘And it isn’t just passage she’ll be offering you. It’s a job on her schooner too.’
The woman Lana ignored Calder’s anger, reaching down to scratch the head of the wizard’s hound. ‘You still with this old reprobate, Buddy? Thought you might have traded up to a better class of master by now?’
‘Pah,’ said the dog, half a resigned growl of agreement.
‘My hound!’ said Matobo.
Calder shivered in superstitious fear. ‘You expect me to demean myself by working as a common sailor, wizard? I have the honour of my house to uphold. You cannot mean me to flee my own land in such a pauper manner?’
‘You call this a little favour?’ laughed Lana Fiveworlds. ‘Taking his neo-barbarian slipped-back ass on the Gravity Rose? Is the boy even housetrained? It’ll be quicker teaching that pet monkey of Polter’s to be crew. What kind of retards were his ancestors anyway, settling on this hell world?’
‘Wasn’t their fault,’ said Matobo. ‘Didn’t you read the wiki on this world? The first settlers came in racked, stacked and packed on coffin ships. Overpopulation excess, poor as dirt. Too poor to pay for a decent survey of the Hesperus system. When they set down, this world was a paradise. Forty years later the interglacial ended, and a full-on ice age started. I still have the original brochure from nine hundred years ago. Fragrant pine forests and sandy beaches. Of course, the settlers were too poor to afford a mass lift-out from Hesperus, even if they’d turned up a civilised planet willing to stamp a quarter of a million no-money colonists’ entry visas. The mining combine backing them shrugged its shoulders, pointed to the emigration indemnity waiver and walked. So here their descendants stayed, and here they shiver.’
‘Jeez,’ said the strange gold-skinned sailor. ‘You just have to look at the forests here. Steel-tough pines you need a plasma cutter to fell. Any biologist worth a dump in the park could’ve told you what kind of weather pattern that’s going to mean. Wasn’t any beach-and-bikini settlement.’
‘You got that right,’ the wizard turned back to Calder. ‘So this is how it is, your highness. Exile is never easy. Take it from someone who can’t go home himself. But it’s either my friends here, or execution by burning if you stay. Trust me, working as crew isn’t as bad as it sounds. Not when you’re on a magic vessel.’
Calder felt recovered enough from his injuries for a flash of anger towards the sorcerer. ‘Trust you! The last time you asked me to trust you, all I ended up losing was my love, my kingdom, my crew, my ship, and now my honour.’
‘You put it like that,’ said Lana Fiveworlds, ‘and I might start liking you. What with us having so much in common and all.’
The golden sailor, Zeno, laughed. ‘Anyone who’s met Rex Matobo has that story in common. You should be ashamed of your flammy ass, old man, coming down here and pulling your Wizard of Oz scam on this failed world.’
The wizard raised his hands placatingly. ‘It was for the locals’ good. Could’ve got them real organized if the horse here I’d backed came in. This place is mineral-rich. Drag it back to the carbon age, set up a freight sling in orbit, and the same mining combine that dumped this hole would be clamouring for cargo boosts from us. Give it a hundred years and we’d be streaming out minerals, a line of solar sails so tight that traffic control would need an upgrade to handle them. And best of all, you do the mining here old school-style, and you’d be pumping out so much CO2 that soon enough the place would be global-warming itself back to short sleeves and cocktails by the beach.’
‘Yeah,’ said Lana Fiveworlds, ‘you’re a real philanthropist, Rex. But seeing as how the reality is you’ve got everyone here all steamed up at you, same as normal, how come you’re not running out and taking Prince Charming with you? I pegged your ship in a crater on the moon, stashed under a stealth web.’
‘My ship’s a fine craft, but she’s hardly bigger than a shuttle,’ said Matobo. ‘And I’ve still got bounty hunters trying to collect on the warrants on my head.’
‘Strange that,’ said Lana. ‘How everyone who you ‘help’ always seems to end up on the lam with a lynchmob a couple of steps behind them.’
‘Risk and reward so often travel together.’
‘Don’t they just,’ said Zeno.
‘I owe Calder Durk a little more than a no-fri
lls ticket out of his homeland,’ said Matobo. ‘If it was simple as that, I could have kept the courier I sent to you waiting until I retrieved the prince from his difficulties, then packed him off in the direction of the first civilised port. Mister Durk needs a new life. The kind of life the Gravity Rose so kindly provided for me in the old days.’
‘This is it then?’ said Calder. ‘You would make a coward of me. I am to run away, exiled?’ He hardly cared now. All he could think of was Sibylla in the arms of that foreign dog. Sibylla had encouraged him to walk the path to war, and now here she was, welcoming their common enemy’s embrace – it didn’t bear thinking about. Be glad your father and mother passed before they could see this. Be glad your brothers died in battle. Be glad the council already loathed you as an untested, untried pup. Unable to be crowned king until you’d proved yourself with a triumph.
‘Will Noak bear this exile with me?’
Matobo shook his head. ‘Your manservant was on his heels as soon as I fixed up his broken ribcage. Said you and he had an agreement. I paid him off on your behalf, the new queen sitting on your treasury and all.’
‘You’re not going to run away, your highness,’ said Lana. ‘You’re going to fly. In style.’
Calder felt a twinge in his leg where the crossbow bolt should still be impaled. ‘Are we to travel by Matobo the Magnificent’s giant beetles?’
‘Matobo the what?’ Zeno laughed.’ You and me going to have a few words, you ever going to call yourself crew.’
‘Where are my clothes?’ asked Calder.
‘Incinerated,’ said Matobo. The wizard produced a white set of undergarments and a pair of full-body overalls similar to the ones worn by the female captain and her golden sailor. ‘You recognize these greens, skipper?’
Lana seemed amused. ‘You kept them, all this time?’
‘You’re about my build, my prince,’ said the wizard. ‘They should fit you. Put them on, and may they bring you luck.’
‘The kind that ain’t bad,’ added Zeno.
They showed no sign of leaving, so Calder drew on the underpants, vest and then stepped into the green single-piece uniform. A whole village might share the fire of a great hall in the depths of winter, so Calder wasn’t overly concerned or self-conscious as the wizard and his retinue observed his nakedness. Calder reached down by his side. It felt empty with no scabbard. ‘I lost my sabre when my ice schooner was fired at harbour.’
‘We got our own,’ said Lana, laughing.
‘Where is the humour in that?’
‘The shore boat that landed my friends here is known as a sabre,’ explained Matobo. ‘It’s an acronym. SABRE. Synergetic Air-Breathing Rocket Engine. And you had better be on your way. A nighttime takeoff will draw less attention to your presence.’
‘Shizzle, Matobo. You worried we’ll melt the lead on your tower’s roof? We’ll hover on repulsers until we hit the mesosphere,’ said Lana. She looked at Calder. ‘Don’t worry about your sword, your highness. Believe it or not, we do have some blades racked in the Gravity Rose, for our own little medieval moments. We’ll give you one thing to take with you, though.’ She looked across at her golden-skinned sailor and winked. ‘You remember that two-timing louse Pitor, and what I did to him when we docked at Zeta Reticuli?’
Zeno shrugged. ‘As well as your ex-boyfriend does, I’m sure. What is it with you organics and your plumbing?’
Lana slapped Calder on the arm. ‘Time to have some fun, your highness.’
Fun. Calder remembered what that was like. It seemed a hell of a long time ago, though.
***
Sibylla dragged herself out from under her heavy, warm, quilted blankets, pulling back the velvet curtains on her large four-poster bed. There was the sound again. She hadn’t been certain at first, what with the noise of the loutish high marshal snoring beside her, but someone was clearly urinating within earshot. Given that the only chamber pot in the royal apartments was tucked under her bed, and the nearest alternative toilet was the moat’s ramparts a corridor’s walk away, this wasn’t a wholesome development.
The recently crowned queen reached under the bed, finding the hidden dagger scabbard. She removed it, scabbard and all, not yet drawing it. The blade was poisoned and she didn’t want to risk pricking herself, still half-asleep. Not unless there really was an assassin inside the palace’s royal apartments. Perhaps someone on the staff who had needed to fill up with a couple of litres of liquid courage, only to find themselves caught short on the way to remove Sibylla from the throne. One of her younger sister’s thugs maybe, the princess hoping to move herself up the line of royal precedence now there were two kingdoms to claim, rather than one? Or a loyalist from the previous regime? Perhaps Sibylla hadn’t purged the ranks of the royal bodyguard as thoroughly as she thought she had?
Sibylla felt the cold from the wind before she spotted the open door on the balcony. Her royal gown of state laid spread across the floor, and the smell! She stepped barefooted through the warm puddle soaking her clothes, and mastering her revulsion, she tore back the heavy curtain. The balcony was empty? She stepped carefully outside, her dagger drawn, ready to slice the rope of any attacker’s grappling hook. But Sibylla found only the forty-foot drop of the granite walls outside, the dark bulk of the city beyond and below, a handful of windows illuminated by candlelight at this late hour. Merely the cold to kill her with pneumonia if she tarried here naked too long.
For a second, Sibylla thought she heard a distant echo of familiar laughter. Calder Durk? The mocking noise came from the sky. A distant shape dark against the black of night sky, a night bird shrinking into the heavens on this freezing cold night? She kicked her way past her ruined garment in disgust. Did ghosts get to take a leak one last time, before being carried away into the Halls of the Twice-born? Away into the heavens? She sighed. Maybe the priests would know? Sadly, there would be a lot more of them crossing the ice from Narvalak in the years ahead.
***
Matobo had the contents of his storage chests laid across his bed, sifting through the things he’d collected during his years on Hesperus.
‘There isn’t much to show here for years of freezing my ass off on this lousy planet,’ he told his hound.
The throat muscles around the dog’s neck bulged as it started to speak. There were a few things that even top-notch genetic engineers couldn’t get right. ‘You should’ve told Lana the truth.’
Unsurprisingly, Matobo found he didn’t agree with his hound. ‘If she knew about the prince, there is no way she’d be shipping out with him. Not even as stowage, let alone crew.’
The hound shook its head sadly. ‘You think I don’t know, but I do. It was you who warned the priests the prince was heading for the baron’s castle. You set Calder up to be betrayed. Ally or not, Baron Halvard had no choice. It was switch sides or be invaded.’
Matobo shrugged, but didn’t deny the accusation. ‘Calder wouldn’t have left if he still thought he had a chance to get his kingdom back, would he? And this way everyone thinks he’s dead. Killed in an oil blaze set by the baron’s assassins, murdered with nothing left to live for.’
‘You underestimate them,’ growled the hound.
‘I’m not about to do that. Listen, pup, it’s all about risk and reward, same as it ever was.’
No. I’m careful enough. There wasn’t going to be much evidence left behind to show that Rex Matobo had even been on this planet. Not after he’d packed and left the cold world of Hesperus light years behind him. Never let it be said that Matobo the Magnificent wasn’t a careful man. Matobo had grown even more cautious after the events of a few months ago. The heavily armed scout ship jumping out of hyperspace into Hesperus system. Coming looking for something incredibly valuable. Expecting only a few axe-wielding barbarians as opposition. Matobo chuckled. Nobody expected a wizard. Certainly not one paranoid enough of uninvited visitors to have seeded Hesperus orbit with hundreds of stealth mines. Hardly a fair fight at all, but then that
was the only sort Matobo got out of bed for. Any other kind of conflict was far too dangerous and unpredictable. Matobo was even going to jettison their pilot’s corpse into the sun before he jumped out. Burn it up on the same trajectory he had used to dispose of the badly holed scout ship. Not a scrap of DNA left to indicate that one of their crew had been captured alive, the pilot’s mind probed and stripped of every useful scrap of data, putting Matobo back in the game. And back on the run, of course. But he was used to that.
‘You are letting the Gravity Rose’s crew run the risk,’ accused the hound. ‘If Calder Durk is traced back to the ship, everyone on board is going to be murdered to ensure their silence.’
‘Lana and Zeno owe me their lives,’ said Matobo. ‘I think we can call our debt balanced out now, don’t you? And it probably won’t come to such unpleasantries; let’s plan for the worst and hope for the best. We just need to find ourselves a buyer for Calder Durk. Can’t do that with the merchandise on board, waiting to be jacked out from under us, can we? After we secure ourselves an honest buyer for the prince, then everyone is happy.’
‘Do I look happy?’ asked the genetically modified hound.
‘You’ve got a naturally sad face,’ said Matobo. ‘Even as a puppy you always looked like you were chewing a wasp.’
The hound sucked in its cheeks and sloped off. Matobo’s own conscience on four goddamn legs.
CHAPTER THREE – Sliding void
Calder felt a sprinkle of water on his face as he came around, his head throbbing as hard as it had been inside the wizard’s tower. Except he wasn’t in the wizard’s tower, he was in a metal-walled chamber with the strange golden sailor, Zeno, sitting in a chair opposite a bunk unit built into the wall where Calder was laid out. ‘What happened?’