Cold Iron (Masters & Mages)

by Miles Cameron

  Aranthur had no idea what he meant, as usual. He pointed at the floor.

  ‘There is something redolent with power under the floorboards.’

  He used his sword blade to pry at them after all three of them cleared the glass and parchment away.

  ‘What is all the vellum for?’ Kurvenos asked.

  Drako held up the scrap he’d retrieved earlier.

  ‘What does it look like?’

  ‘A paper boat,’ Aranthur said.

  Drako nodded. ‘I thought so too. Or a very small party hat.’ He laughed bitterly. ‘I’m supposed to be somewhere else doing something else, and I hope none of my spiderwebs unravel. But we’re here now, and—’

  He whistled. Then he leant down, snapped something metallic, and pulled. The floorboards came up on a hinge, and underneath was a locked door.

  Kurvenos went outside and returned with two men in full armour and a third with an axe over his shoulder, wearing a long hauberk of maille and a magnificent golden helmet.

  ‘An Imperial Axe,’ Kurvenos said. ‘For Iralia.’

  Drako held something out. It looked like an iron rose.

  All three armoured figures nodded.

  ‘When I open this door, anything could wait beneath it,’ he said.

  The two Magdalenes closed their visors and took their blades in their hands, ready to fight.

  Aranthur was loading the fallen man’s puffer. He had the powder and balls in vellum cartridges he wore in a little wallet on his body; Aranthur spanned the lock after priming it. Searching the unconscious man, he realised that this was the jeweller himself: Rachman. He spent a moment stopping the man’s bleeding.

  ‘This is Rachman, the jeweller,’ he said to Drako.

  ‘You’re sure?’ Drako grinned like Zanni, the Twelver god of tricks and lies. ‘My night is made.’

  Aranthur ran his hands over Rachman’s figure, over his throat and chest. The jeweller wore a bunch of talismans and a huge kuria crystal which, lit by Kurvenos’ glow, was rose pink.

  There was also a pair of golden keys.

  Aranthur used his Arnaut knife to cut the chain that held them, and tossed the keys to Drako, dropping the crystal and the talismans into his own purse.

  Drako winked at him.

  Aranthur took a breath. The image of the Arnaut thief was one he always tried to counter, but larceny was becoming natural.

  Drasko summoned two militiamen to fetch an Imoter.

  ‘I want him alive,’ he said.

  Even Kurvenos spent some power on the fallen jeweller. Only when the man had been taken away on a soldier’s cloak did Drako cock a puffer.

  ‘Everyone ready?’ he asked, and tried the door.

  It was locked. It didn’t even rattle.

  Drako put one key into the lock, grunted, and tried the second.

  It clicked. He lifted. The heavy iron door seemed to hiss as it opened.

  The two Magdalenes dropped into the darkness and Kurvenos pushed his white light into the lower room.

  ‘Clear,’ said one of the Magdalenes in a woman’s voice.

  The Imperial Axe relaxed.

  ‘I think you need to see this,’ one of the Magdalenes said.

  Aranthur dropped down after Drako, the loaded puffer in his belt. They were in a long room, a sort of finished warehouse cellar. There was a set of heavy shelving – forty shelves running the length of the basement – and on the shelves were packets, wrapped in myrta leaves, of raw thuryx, uncut. The black, tarry cakes gave the whole room a scent of cinnamon and ginger.

  Drako was standing with a packet in his hands, the myrta vine cut to reveal the contents of the leaf.

  ‘Damn, damn, damn,’ he said.

  At the far end of the basement was a jeweller’s bench, lit by a very expensive magelight, itself powered by kuria. The shelves above the bench were laden with drawers of kuria crystal – hundreds of them, in all sizes and shapes.

  Aranthur reached into one, cast, and found it untainted. And another.

  But on the bench were three large jewels, and one smaller, that all carried the infusion of power that made them lethal.

  Aranthur didn’t touch them, but he looked carefully at the bench. One of the tainted crystals was dark, blood red – an almost impossible colour for kuria, which was sometimes pale blue or rose red, especially from the Imperial Heart, but usually white or pale yellow and never, ever dark red.

  He sat in the jeweller’s seat and began to open the drawers, and Drako came and stood behind him.

  The jeweller’s bench was not so different from a leather-worker’s bench. Drawers held tools: wax; scribes; a set of small chisels; sharpening stones; a drawer of hammers, most of them very small; a crystal, ground to provide magnification; a large iron bowl of what appeared to be tar.

  Aranthur smelt it. ‘Pine pitch,’ he said.

  With his nose close to the surface, he could see that the pitch was pocked with holes; bits of jewellery had been worked on its surface. They looked like rosettes.

  There was an iron vice and a set of iron surfaces, a tiny anvil and a larger one. And a single piece of parchment, with odd red marks on it.

  Aranthur took the parchment and placed it under the magnifying crystal, very like the Imperial Reader he used to decipher Safiri. Up close, he could see that the red marks were left by something that had been painted.

  It was the same red as the tainted kuria.

  Aranthur turned around. ‘Drako, is it possible that the Servant was attacking this place?’

  Drako made a face. ‘Yes,’ he admitted. ‘Anything is possible.’

  ‘He certainly didn’t come from inside. He intended to prevent Kallinikos and Djinar and the others from acting. I even know what they planned. I don’t know how they came to own the thuryx and the kuria.’ Aranthur shook his head. ‘But why?’

  Drako looked at Kurvenos. ‘No idea. Except that the Pure are very focused on Atti right now, and Kallinikos and his faction care only what happens in the City.’

  Kurvenos nodded. ‘Volta is young, vicious and arrogant. He cares little for the wider issues …’

  Aranthur turned to the Lightbringer. ‘Volta is going to try and kill the Emperor. Tomorrow, at the reconciliation ceremony.’

  Drako looked at him. ‘You sound very sure of yourself.’

  Aranthur put his hand on the anvil.

  ‘The iron is cold,’ he said.

  Early morning in the Crystal Palace. The guard changed; the Nomadi went off duty, hurrying to their barracks to prepare for the ships that would take them to Atti. It was an open secret now – the war with Atti had begun, and the General was already in the field.

  The Noble Guard had been assigned to guard the corridors of Imperial power, but they did not appear. Instead, the entire body of the Axe Bearing Guard turned out, a once in a lifetime event: five hundred young giants in long hauberks, with axes and glaives and partisans and giant swords, every one of them in a helmet worked in gold filigree and wearing a cloak of Imperial purple and bright red boots. They moved purposefully through the corridors, taking up guard positions outside the Imperial chambers and throughout the audience halls and stables, and even the gardens.

  Aranthur was awakened by the sound of crashing feet and heavy armour in the corridor outside his room.

  ‘Time,’ came a voice.

  He could scarcely move. He felt as if he’d been beaten with an iron club, over and over; there was not a muscle that was not strained or sore.

  The Axe opened the door. A servant came in – the blond man who had helped clean the rooms for Prince Ansu.

  ‘Good morning sir,’ he said. ‘I have quaveh, and a masseur waiting outside. And I am to tell you that Dama Iralia will join you for breakfast.’

  An hour later, pounded within an inch of his life by a masseur who might have been on the secret list of Imperial torturers, fortified with quaveh, and wearing a magnificent scarlet silk fustanella that had been laid out on the bed for him by unseen hand
s, Aranthur was taken to breakfast by the Axe.

  ‘The Fideles Aranthur Timos,’ he was announced.

  The Emperor rose from his seat and wiped a bit of egg from his mouth with his snowy white napkin. It was instantly replaced.

  Aranthur bowed, his legs creaking with pain.

  Iralia was sitting by the Emperor. Her ear was restored, although the left side of her head was an intricate web of white scars and sparkling crystal where an active medical occulta from a very powerful Imoter was keeping it all knitted together.

  ‘It hurts to talk,’ Iralia said.

  ‘You saved me,’ Aranthur said, ignoring the Emperor.

  She smiled very slightly. ‘We saved … something,’ she said very quietly, her lips scarcely moving.

  ‘What you both saved, is me,’ the Emperor said.

  The day wore on. Coaches came and went; the Attian ambassador came, and with deadly formality, presented the Imperial Court with Atti’s declaration of war. He was received gracefully, and not offered wine.

  After the twelfth bell, the Axe Bearing Guard turned out again, and every position in every corridor was changed.

  Soon after, the Duke of Volta’s coach entered the great drive before the palace. He was attended by almost four hundred armoured men on fine horses, in direct defiance of an Imperial edict. Half of them dismounted with him, and the rest remained in the great, ten-acre courtyard under the imposing walls of glass and crystal.

  The Duke of Volta’s helmet framed the surprise on his naked face as he registered that the Noble Guard were not on duty. Almost equally surprising, the Axe-Bearing Guard made no attempt to stop him and his armed men from approaching the Audience Hall, the very centre of the great crystal lantern that were the main halls of the Imperial Palace. The Audience Hall was over a hundred feet tall, almost nine hundred feet in length, buttressed by white marble like the organically grown branches of a tree, with sheets of clear crystal between them. A thousand magelights burned from the high nave, night and day, so that the palace always shone like a great temple of light. High above them rose the needle of glass that men claimed had once flown, long ago.

  The Emperor sat on a low dais. He sat comfortably in an ordinary chair – if a gold and ebony and ivory chair taken from one of the official banquet rooms could be called ordinary. He was not formally dressed, but wore the comfortable linen clothes a prosperous man might wear to go hunting. He wore almost no jewels. He did not rise when the duke was announced. The duke swept down the Audience Hall to the clash and rattle of his armoured bodyguard.

  The long hall of glass and mirrors dwarfed the Duke of Volta. It dwarfed the Emperor. It had been built to induce awe in visitors, and that compulsion lingered over the centuries and was only enhanced by history. Above the duke, in stained glass, his ancestors and the ancestors of the Emperor supported Tirase, conquered the North, ended slavery, defeated Atti, and opened the Academy. The coloured light of a hundred generations of governance fell on the duke’s white-gold hair as he clashed to a halt at the foot of the dais.

  The Emperor was not alone. At his side, with her arm in a sling, was Iralia. She wore a hundred magnificent rubies in a net on her hair, an effect spoiled by the line of her scalp where a third of her hair had been burned away, although the gold wire of the rubies’ setting did obscure the lines of crystal that held her face together.

  ‘Bowing is traditional,’ the Emperor said, after a pause.

  ‘You didn’t even wear a state robe!’ Volta said. ‘You think I’m some child to be reprimanded! Where is the throne?’

  The Emperor put his chin in his right hand and leant back.

  ‘In storage.’ His voice changed. ‘It is not for you, the throne.’

  Volta frowned. Then he glanced at Iralia, and smiled.

  ‘You look good in jewels, whore,’ he said.

  Iralia smiled very carefully.

  Volta smiled back. ‘Just exactly as I imagined it,’ he said, and closed his visor.

  He raised his armoured hand faster than a pair of Imperial Axes could close on him.

  ‘Goodbye, cousin,’ he said from within his helmet. He raised his arm.

  Nothing happened.

  Nothing except that two armoured men grabbed him by the arms and flung him to the carpet. Then they stood on his arms.

  Behind him, his standard bearer put a hand on his sword, and his men-at-arms pushed forward.

  Almost faster than a man could think, the hall was flooded with soldiers – not a hundred or two hundred, but almost the whole of the Guard: the Axe Bearers, the Nomadi, the Ferikon, a regiment of mercenary knights from the north and west; Keltai and Ictan barbarians from beyond the Iron Circle. Every door into the hall opened, and in they came, a rising tide of gold armour and scarlet and purple. And over it all, the rush of wings, like the largest hawk or eagle ever born, multiplied fifty times. Aranthur looked up in time to see the drake settle.

  Taken at odds of almost twenty to one by the best soldiers in the Empire, the duke’s guards gave way. Only his standard bearer drew a weapon. He was beaten to the floor with the hafts of axes, a hail of blows his armour could not fully stop, and knocked unconscious.

  Prostrate on the floor, the duke attempted to cast, and found his power siphoned away. He screamed as a large, taloned foot pressed onto his back.

  The Emperor sighed as the drake ate the duke’s power.

  ‘He is my cousin,’ he said, almost petulantly.

  Iralia nodded. ‘He must go.’

  The Emperor rose to his feet. ‘Did he attempt to trigger the jewels?’ he asked the drake.

  The drake stood with one broad foot on the back of the fallen man and a smug, if reptilian, smile.

  ‘Oh, yessss,’ hissed the drake.

  The Emperor looked as if he might cry. Instead, he stood up straight.

  ‘Let him up,’ he spat.

  The Axes very cautiously hauled the duke to his feet.

  ‘You plotted my death,’ he said. ‘You had these kuria crystals turned into a disgusting weapon, and then you disguised them as rubies so that I would wear them. With the robes of state.’

  Volta’s arrogance was undaunted. ‘I am of the Blood. I am beyond accusation or trial and I will have what is rightfully mine.’

  ‘You attempted my death,’ the Emperor said.

  Volta shrugged. ‘We will triumph in the end. Your whores and your animals and your peasant mob cannot protect you forever.’

  ‘You are of the Blood,’ the Emperor said. He was red in the face, his lifelong dedication to urbanity and good manners gone. He was angry. ‘You want to destroy everything we have built. We are servants, not masters, and you are a fool. You are beyond a trial, but this, my dear cousin, is the palace, and I am the Emperor.’ He turned to the Axes. ‘Strangle him.’

  Volta was in full armour and he attempted to struggle. To Aranthur Timos, a few paces away, it was a horrible lesson in the power of training. One Axe raised the haft of his weapon between the duke’s knees into his groin, and when he doubled over, the other man fastidiously removed a wire from his mail sleeve and threw it over the duke’s head. He crossed his hands, and pulled sharply.

  The duke’s eyes seemed to bulge out of his head as the wire bit into his neck.

  A palace servant appeared with a silk cloth. He stood, wiping the blood from the duke’s neck, as the wire bit deeper and the man died.

  ‘No blood has ever been shed in the Imperial Audience Hall,’ Kurvenos said at Aranthur’s side. ‘None must touch the floor, at least.’

  The wire went through the man’s neck muscles and the Axe pulled it tight, but the duke was dead.

  The Emperor exhaled.

  ‘Clear the hall,’ he said.

  Six of them sat in a magnificent greenhouse garden on the seaward side of the great Crystal Palace. Tiy Drako sat with his legs up, playing his tamboura and flirting with Dahlia. Sasan glared at the two of them with ill-concealed hostility. Prince Ansu tried a courtly attentiveness on Iral
ia, who had a pair of Imoters working on her arm as she listened.

  Very carefully, she whispered, ‘Perhaps now that my face is ruined, you’ll desist?’

  Ansu laughed. ‘Never. It is not your face, nor your magnificent body, that I desire.’

  ‘Come, this is better,’ Iralia muttered, with her jaw almost unmoving. ‘You have almost learned how to flatter me.’

  Kurvenos came in, his long grey robe brushing the floor.

  ‘The Emperor,’ he said quietly, and everyone, Iralia included, got to their feet.

  The Emperor came in, and smiled.

  ‘Sit, sit,’ he said quietly.

  He looked out of the tall windows at the sea for long enough that Aranthur started to fidget, Ansu to look at his nails, and Drako to tug at his beard.

  The Emperor turned back to them.

  ‘The Empire owes you all a debt of gratitude. But because I trust you, I wish to say that today, I feel nothing but anger, and fear, just as my enemies wish me to feel. I have killed my cousin.’ He shrugged. ‘I will carry that burden all my life – that, and the deaths of every man and woman who has died in this infernal conflict. How many died last night?’ he asked Kurvenos.

  ‘Thirty-six,’ Kurvenos said. ‘So far. The milliner will probably die today.’

  The Emperor looked around, as if studying each face in turn.

  ‘Nine of Volta’s people died last night,’ he said. ‘The other twenty-seven were bystanders, local shopkeepers, and their families.’

  Iralia flinched. The movement hurt, and she choked with pain.

  ‘I didn’t think—’ Aranthur began.

  Drako stood suddenly. ‘With respect, Majesty,’ he said, ‘Aranthur didn’t think of that. If he had, Volta would be in the palace now, and you and Iralia would be dead.’

  The Emperor nodded slowly. ‘I know. They’re still dead.’

  ‘And Kallinikos Primo and his wife and both sons and seven of their servants,’ Kurvenos said. ‘And we still do not know how it was done.’

  ‘One of the crystals exploded with lethal force,’ Drako said. ‘Enormous force, exactly as the Master of Arts predicted. But how that crystal reached their palazzo …’ He shook his head. ‘Their line is virtually extinguished.’