by Dave Duncan
Warden, you will have to excuse us. Sir Durendal
brings urgent business, which I do believe may
take some time." Laying a meaty arm on the
surprised noble's shoulders, he propelled him
to the exit. Then he banished Screwsley with a
dagger glance and shut the door himself, chortling.
That left Durendal.
"Lord Warden of Windmills," the king
muttered. "Do you have urgent business?" His
jocularity turned to suspicion.
"Vital, sire, if not quite urgent."
The suspicion increased. "Namely?"
"Majesty, you are about to declare war on most of the
conjurers in the kingdom."
"You are not supposed to know that!"
"Half the population knows it. My job now
is to prepare a defense against the inevitable
retaliation."
The next few minutes were at least as stormy
as he had expected. On one hand, the King
refused to believe that anyone would dare attack
him by conjuration. On the other, he had a
deep-seated dread of exactly that. He detested
his Guard's attempts to mother him, although this was its
duty. He had no lack of courage, except
that he feared being thought a coward. If Parliament
heard that he had increased his personal guard, it
might refuse to pass the bill. And so on.
Eventually Durendal went down on his
knees. "My liege, I must humbly beg you
to relieve me of my duties as com--"
"Blast you! Double blast you! No, I will not
relieve you of your duties. Get on your
feet. Why do I tolerate your stubborn
impudence? There isn't one man in the realm who
defies me the way you do. I ought to fire you!"
The glare stiffened and then slowly melted. The
King guffawed. "That wasn't too logical was
it?"
Tricky. "It was too subtle for me,
sire."
The King boomed out another laugh and thumped his
Blade on the shoulder. "I just hope I don't
cut off your head one day before I change my
mind. How can I get rid of you this time? What's
the absolute minimum you will accept?"
"Sire, I have always kept the Guard below
official strength. In normal times, this keeps
them on their toes. I do think times may not be
normal for the next little while. There are eight
seniors ready at Ironhall."
"Eight? Last report I saw said three."
"Grand Master will approve eight, sire.
Mother Superior can obtain another dozen White
Sisters ..."
"At what price, mm? Blasted women bleed
the treasury dry." The little amber eyes peered
suspiciously out of their caves of fat.
"If I go to Ironhall and let you hire six
more sniffers, will that shut you up?"
Durendal bowed. "For the moment at least,
sire."
"Go!" As his Blade reached the door,
Ambrose shouted, "I'm only humoring you because
you got that warden windbag out of my hair, you
understand?"
Impulse ... "Sire, when is his next
audience?"
"Out!" roared the King.
The King rode to Starkmoor four days later,
and that time Durendal went with him. He had warned
Grand Master in advance about the cheering problem, and the
word had been passed down the ranks. His
Majesty and the Commander entered the hall together, receiving
a memorable ovation. Eight excited new
Blades swelled the King's escort when he
departed.
Durendal, meanwhile, had quietly
investigated the next crop. He urged that they be
brought on as fast as possible. He held a long
meeting with the knights, laying out his concerns for
royal safety in the days to come.
Parliament convened. Durendal stood beside the
throne while the King read his speech to the assembled
Lords and Commons. Things began to go wrong very
soon after that.
The Lords were quite amenable to the Great Matter. As
major landowners themselves, the peers disliked the way
the elementaries were gobbling up the countryside, so
if the King thought he could bring them to heel, they would
willingly cheer from a safe distance.
The Commons had other ideas. Taxing the conjuring
orders was low on their scale of priorities,
even dangerous, not necessarily advisable. The
elementaries were good for business. Everyone needed
healing magic, perfectly respectable burghers
changed the subject when there was mention of love
charms or aphrodisiacs, and many an honorable
member wore a good-luck amulet under his shift.
The Commons were much more interested in curtailing
monopolies, raising import duties,
reducing export duties, and especially in ending
the accursed Second Baelish War, which had been
dragging on now for more than a decade. Nor had
the Commons forgotten the Treaty of Fettle.
As the voices droned, day after day,
a consensus emerged--the Commons decided they
particularly disliked the King's first minister. The
Chancellor's duties included bullying
Parliament into carrying out the sovereign's wishes,
but now the Commons began to bully the Chancellor.
It was his fault that taxes were so high and the cost of
building the palace of Nocare had drained the
treasury. He was to blame for the monopolies and
perhaps the bad harvests, too. He was certainly
responsible for the Fettle humiliation and the
Baelish monsters turning the coasts to desert.
No decision had been reached when Parliament
recessed for the Long Night festivities. The
King was furious. Durendal relaxed a little.
Montpurse promised action as soon as the
holiday season was over, and he was as good as his
word. With flagrant intimidation and wholesale
bribery, he jostled the bill along. It passed
second reading in the early days of Firstmoon.
One more vote would bring it to the palace for the royal
seal.
If anything was going to happen, it ought to happen
before that.
Durendal had gone to bed. He went to bed every
night, on principle, to make love or just
snuggle. Even after six years of marriage, it
was almost always the former--a man had to uphold the
legend--and he was frequently back at
Kate's side again when she awoke, for much the
same reasons. While she slept, he attended
to less important matters, like business,
fencing, reading, or carousing. Poised on one
leg, he had just put one foot into his britches
when she screamed. He regained his balance and
ripped the curtains aside. She was sitting up,
but he could not make out her face in the dark.
"Where?" he said.
"Everywhere!" She screamed again. "It's
terrible! Stop it!"
He snatched up his sword and an enchanted
lantern--one of a score that he had bullied out
normal man who abandoned his wife and children like that
would be a despicable poltroon, but a Blade
had no option. Kate knew that. It was shock that
had made her react as she had, never
fear. She would cope.
He raced across the children's room, where a
five-year-old girl and a ten-year-old boy were
just waking in terror at the noise. He shouted,
"Look after your mother and sister, Andy!" and was
halfway across the salon. Those three rooms
comprised his personal world when court was at
Greymere, and they were much more luxurious than any
other member of the Guard enjoyed. As he reached the
corridor beyond, he realized that he was wearing
next to nothing. Had the alarm come five seconds
sooner, he would not have had even that.
By the wavering light of the lantern, he sprinted
for the King's quarters. The palace was dark and
silent, although he assumed that every White Sister
would be reacting as loudly as Kate had--the
building was just too huge and solid for him to hear
them yet. He had a long corridor to traverse
and two staircases to climb. Common sense
might suggest that the Commander should be billeted
close to the King. That was the case in most of the other
palaces and had perhaps once been the case in
Greymere; but the old building had been extended
and modified a hundred times, until now it was a
labyrinth and any such convenient arrangement had
been lost. Moreover, Blades did not
sleep, so common sense did not apply to them.
He was not greatly concerned, even yet. The
royal suite could only be reached through a
guardroom where three Blades were always on
duty. For the last three months, that number had
been increased to twelve as soon as the King
retired. Nor was Ambrose aware that rooms just
outside the royal suite held another dozen
swordsmen and more kept vigil in the grounds below his
windows. The entire Guard, now comprising
eighty-seven men, was on high alert and should be able
to rally within minutes. Seventy-two knights had
been called back from retirement and smuggled into the
palace. If the king learned of them before they were
needed, he would roast Durendal whole.
The problem, of course, had been to know what form
the assault might take. If it involved an
attack on the building with the sort of thunderbolt
power wielded by the Destroyer General and his
Royal Office of Demolition, then swords
would be useless. Defense against fire and air was the
responsibility of the conjurers of the College.
Durendal had alerted them, nagged them, and--he
hoped--persuaded them to take all
possible precautions. The Guard was concerned
only with personal assault by people, probably
crazed people roused to killer madness by enchantment, like
the assassins who had cut down Goisbert
II.
Or so he had thought.
He had just reached the bottom of the staircase
when something hurtled out of the darkness into the light of his
lantern, coming straight at him. He thrust out
Harvest instinctively and skewered it through its
chest.
It was only a dog.
There were scores of dogs around the palace, every
palace. They varied from enormous deerhounds to the
cute little bundles of fluff that the ladies
cuddled when they had nothing better to cuddle. This
one was about the size of a sheep, of no discernible
breed. No, it was not only a dog. It had
been coming on its hind legs, so he had struck it
as he would strike a man, and it ran right up the
sword at him. With a yell of horror, he let
go of the hilt just before the monster sank its teeth in
his hand. It fell to the floor, snarling and yelping
while he jumped clear of the snapping fangs,
wishing he was wearing boots, thick boots.
Now he could hear uproar in the distance, two
floors above him. Spraying blood around
Harvest's hilt, the dog hauled itself upright, then
reared on its hind legs and came at him again.
He beat at it with the lantern, and it went down
again. He rammed the lantern into its jaws so he
could snatch the hilt and drag Harvest free. In
sudden gloom, the dog rallied and attacked again,
this time going for his legs. Now he knew better
than to stab--he slashed, splitting its skull
through one eye and one ear.
It rolled in the sea of blood it had already
lost. But still it was not dead. Leaping backward from
its attack, he slashed and hacked, blood
sticky on his hand, the lantern light winking
uncertainly. He cut off the monster's head.
The body reared up, front paws clawing at
him. He swung mightily, and cut it in two.
The halves flailed helplessly, while the head
was still snapping. It couldn't move, though, so he
left it and went racing up the stairs.
In the distance, the great bell began to toll, the
signal he had arranged. At the first landing, he
could hear tumult along the corridor in both
directions--men cursing, women screaming
--but he had to keep going upward, heading for the
King. The dog-thing had attacked him on sight,
so while the attack might be aimed at the King,
everyone was vulnerable.
Halfway up the second flight of stairs,
he heard claws following him. Ignoring them,
he reached the top and sprinted along the passage.
Lights flickered and flashed ahead of him, showing
men and monsters fighting. There were bodies on the
ground--men with their throats torn out, fragments of
dog still thrashing and snapping. But the men were winning and
now more of them were emerging from the doorways.
"Silence!" he bellowed. "Blades stay with the
King." That was inevitable, of course. "Knights,
go and hunt down the rest. Clear the palace!"
Close on his heels came a pack of
monsters, streaming out of the darkness with eyes glowing in
the light of the lanterns. Sheepdogs, mastiffs,
bulldogs, wolfhounds, terriers, cuddly
lapdogs--so they had been. Now many were teetering
on hind legs and most of them were man-sized or
even bigger, with slavering nightmare jaws. But there
were twenty or more men in the press of defenders, so
he squirmed through them until he reached the first
door. He rapped the agreed signal--three,
two, one.
Locks clattered and the door opened a slit.
Terrified eyes peered out at him, and then he was
allowed in. The doorkeeper was Falcon, the one
with the upturned nose he had first met years ago,
while returning Wolfbiter's sword
to Ironhall. Now Falcon was one of the
officers, although more because of his sword skills than
the quality of
his judgment. He slammed the door
again and locked it, but by then his leader was already running
through the warren of the royal suite.
He passed four dead dogs in pieces and
two dead men before he reached the bedchamber. The bed
curtains were ripped and torn down, revealing a
girl sitting there with covers up to her chin. She was
so high on the heaped mattresses that he could see
her over the heads of the men standing in a ring around the
bed, and he registered her ashen face and
wide-stretched eyes and bloodless lips. She
looked as though she wanted to scream and could not find
air.
At the foot of the bed stood the King in a
purple robe, with his scanty hair all awry,
steadying his hands on the hilt of an upright
broadsword. His expression suggested
that somebody was going to die to pay for this, probably
several somebodies. All around him stood
Blades and knights. There were four dismembered
dogs on the floor, the pieces still thrashing.
Big dogs. Huge dogs, they had been. And a
whole lot of blood. The air was foul with the stench
of blood and offal. The expensive rugs would be
ruined.
Muffled tolling of the bell and distant screaming
--but in the room, sudden silence.
"You should not appear before us improperly
dressed, Commander." The King was more shaken than he
wanted to show, but obviously in control of himself.
Starting to enjoy himself, in fact, the fat bastard.
"Anyone hurt in here?"
"Nothing serious," said Dreadnought, who had
succeeded Snake as deputy commander. He had
blood all over his arms and in his sand-colored
beard. There was a makeshift bandage on his left
wrist. "We lost a couple out there, though."
"I saw them." Durendal made a fast
count. Thirty or so. If that wasn't enough, he
couldn't imagine what would be. The King, thank
all spirits, was not given to sleeping with dogs. His
last queen had been, though--four or five at a
time--but she was gone. Lucky!
He said, "They're not just coming here, sire. They
seem to be attacking anyone. I think we can
keep you secure, but I'm afraid we have
casualties elsewhere."
To confirm his remark, a chorus of deep baying
had almost drowned out the tolling of the bell. It
sounded like a choir of thousands.
The King's dawning smile shriveled away.
"Has anyone any idea of how many dogs there
are in the palace?"