Duke Cyril II, lord of the city and province of Chengdea, had a headache. It had been with him off-and-on for months, ever since word had come up the river that the Ayzant forces had broken out of the Larbonne waterfront and set siege to the remaining Daulic defenders in the old citadel.
Sometimes if the Duke slept well the headache would be gone in the morning. But it would ooze back into his skull over the course of the long days spent in his throne room. The room had changed now to the point that it was in no condition to receive visitors nor to host any banquet or ceremony. The twin thrones of mahogany inlaid with silver and upholstered with silk still sat on their dais, though Cyril hardly ever sat in his and his wife’s had been empty for twelve years now apart from the jeweled circlet sitting untouched on the pillow, which the Duchess’s staff still dusted and fluffed every day.
The throne room was vast and church-like with stone columns running down a central aisle and wide windows of stained glass high in the tall walls, facing due east and west to dapple the parquet floor with pink light at dawn and somber purple in the evenings. Beneath the windows the paneled walls were covered with adornments, primarily the Chengdean banners of a gold flower on a green field. The blossoms were a species of lotus with four curving petals native to the banks of the Black River, and thus commonly called the Black Lotus despite being a deep yellow bordering on orange. The ancient Ettacean name for the flower was the chengde, and it had given this place a name nearly fourteen centuries ago.
Between the banners, murals and torch brackets were dozens of decorations of a classic Daulic type: Embossed shields mounted over crossed swords. The shields displayed the heraldry of prominent provincial nobles with the family names etched in flowing script on fired clay tablets mounted beneath them. The tablets and even a few of the names such as Gaehei, Vracchi, and Chirobbi hearkened back to ancient times when Chengdea was the twelfth and last province of the Ettacean Empire. A mixture of modified Ettasi names and old Leutian families such as Dolmonum, Towsan, and Orbachauer had become part of this land’s history during the long centuries when Chengdea had survived as an independent successor-state to the fallen empire, ruled by Dukes who still modeled their authority on the defunct Imperial writ.
Most of the shields and the family names were newer and purely Daulic, for the Nan River Kingdom had held sway here for some three-hundred years since its knights had poured into the Duchy to battle the unholy monstrosities that had scuttled out of Vod’Adia and the Wilds at the Second Opening. The Duchy was saved but at the price of independence, for the knights had not gone home after the last wight was hewn asunder, the last shadowy wraith banished. As the shields told, the descendents of men who had been but squires and knights in the Dead War were barons and earls of Daulic Chengdea to this day.
There were two shields above the thrones, that above the circlet in the empty chair was the ancient sigil of the Halvalons of eastern Daul. Cyril’s wife had detested her family banner for while from a distance it just looked like a white dove flanked by two sets of three wheat sheaves, once you got close you could see that the dove was holding an eyeball in its beak, hanging by a red nerve. Duchess Jasmine Halvalon Perforce had been a women of refinement whose sense of decorum did not embrace severed body parts on banners, and especially not on tableware.
The last shield, mounted above the ducal throne, was such a simple design as to have been an afterthought, consisting only of a diagonal gold band on a green background. The design, and Cyril’s family name of Perforce, had only been in existence since the ongoing Ayzant war began with the catastrophic battle of the Icheroon. There on an insignificant stream in the bad borderlands between the Kingdom of Daul and Ayzantium the cream of Daulic chivalry had ridden their heavy horses downhill into sucking marshes that must have looked dry from above. They had been butchered by Zantish peasants with scythes and threshing flails. A line of Dukes who had ruled Chengdea for a century was ended there, as were many much older Daulic families. In the chaos that followed thrones and fiefdoms across the provinces changed hands until seized by someone strong enough to hold onto them. In Chengdea the last man standing had been a minor knight whose lineage dated from Daul’s occupation of the Winding River lands, across the Girdings in Orstaf. Sir Cyril Balabushevych had been crowned Duke Cyril I in this very throne room, with a horse saber in one hand and the dead Duke’s widow in the other. The new Duke had lost the old Kantan mouthful in favor of Perforce, which was both Daulic and indicative of the manner in which his line had come to power.
The younger Cyril had been there as well, barely more than a boy at the time. He had held a blunderbuss on the sweating Jobian priest who conducted the dual wedding ceremony and coronation. As he now remembered it, Cyril had also had a splitting headache on that day.
Within five years the boy had gone from the bastard son of a minor knight who’d had to rent horses for jousts to being crowned himself as Duke Cyril II of Chengdea, for his father’s reign was short. It had ended with a drunken fall down five flights of circular tower stairs. The man who had killed something like fourteen or fifteen rival claimants for the Ducal throne in single combat had met his end after tripping over a cat.
To the equal surprise of Cyril II and the Chengdeanese, the young man had proven up to the task of ruling the Duchy, even as the war with Ayzantium slashed bleeding hunks out of the Kingdom’s southern, coastal flank. Chengdea met all royal demands for manpower and supply from the new King of Daul, Hughes III, who had also come to the throne as a youngster after the old king’s death on the Icheroon. Perhaps because of their likeness in age the young King seemed to trust his young Duke from the beginning, and the two had begun and maintained a warm correspondence between Chengdea and the royal capital of Bouree, or else with Hughes’s headquarters in the field. For Cyril the richest reward of the relationship had been his introduction at the King’s behest to Jasmine Halvalon, the beautiful golden-haired daughter of a powerful but under-titled baronial family in the east.
The demands the war put on Chengdea were severe but not crippling, and Cyril maintained enough forces at home to keep a lid on Magdetchoi raids from the Vod Wilds across the river. With Jasmine’s invaluable assistance he was careful to spread the burdens in men and material among his barons and earls as best he could, and willing to dip directly into the Ducal treasury when necessary to pay his own people for what the King could otherwise take from them by right. The revolts and unrest that had flared up in other provinces had not been felt on the Black River, and noblemen with lineages as long as the history of the province had grudgingly warmed to the upstart Duke. His refined wife was invaluable there, as well. Sad to say, after Jasmine’s illness and untimely passing a dozen years ago, the hearts of the common men and women of Chengdea had further opened to the widowed Duke.
That was all before the Ayzants had set siege to Larbonne, closing the Black River to the trade that was the lifeblood of the Duchy. Cyril’s already strained treasury lurched into the red, and that was actually the least of his problems. Of more concern was that with the fall of Larbonne, which all signs said could not be far off, the Ayzants would have an open path north on rivers and roads directly into Chengdea, and the King had as yet given no sign that he apprehended the threat. Hughes had his army in Chevagia, north of Roseille, Larbonne’s sister port to the east which the Ayzants had occupied for decades since early in the war. Roseille could scarcely even be considered a Daulic city any longer, yet there was Hughes perched above it with his massive army like a row of ducklings peering over the lip of a high nest, unwilling to hazard the jump to the water.
Or so it was said in the Ducal throne room of Chengdea, not by Cyril but by any number of his nobles whom he had gathered there to plan the defense of the Duchy. While the walls still bore their rich adornments, the floor had been cleared of carpets replaced with reed mats. Some of the carved benches and chairs remained but they were pushed back against the walls for instead of a grand banquet board smaller tables suitable for maps and stacked
ledgers filled the floor. Around these, all day every day, stalked those knights and barons who were not serving this year with the King’s army. Most had already done at least one tour with the King and those men spoke among themselves of Hughes’s unwillingness to move his army anywhere that might leave his capital of Bouree exposed, no matter the result for Larbonne, Chengdea, and the rest of “his” Kingdom.
Every day as the word from downriver grew worse the awareness grew among the noblemen of Chengdea that they were going to be on their own. Many a goblet of wine was emptied and many a bold oath was sworn. Men proclaimed that the Duchy would be stoutly defended from the southern baronies to this very throne room, if need be. Given the size of the mercenary-swollen Ayzant army in Larbonne, most thought it probably would.
Such plans as were generated concentrated mostly on slowing the Ayzants in the south so that winter might close the roads to marching armies. Spring might bring relief from Hughes. Or it might not. But no one in Chengdea countenanced supplication to the bloody crown of Ayzantium.
Though he said no such word, Cyril thought spring would be too late. The Shugak of the Vod Wilds were quiet now, running their operations around Vod’Adia, but with the Opening and Closing of that fell place the hobgoblins and bullywugs might well take advantage of Chengdean concentration in the south to raid across the river anywhere else they liked. Good guardsmen on the banks of the Black were necessary to keep the Magdetchoi in check, and Cyril knew that the northern barons loudly proclaiming their dedication to the greater cause of the Duchy would feel far different when their own people were menaced from another quarter, back in their own lands.
As for those nobles, fewer by the day, who still had confidence that the King would come to their defense…Cyril did not disabuse them of that notion. He let their fellows do it for him. Cyril had begun to lose his own faith in Hughes several years back when the King’s personal correspondence had begun to grow strident, paranoid, and increasingly divorced from reality. Hughes had spent most of last year assuring Cyril that his position in Chevagia would keep the Ayzants from moving troops out of Roseille and the Chirabis for an attack in the west, on Larbonne. Cyril had received few letters from Hughes since that attack had happened. In fact, the only direct orders he had received in the last six months had been brought to Cyril in person by a High Lord Knight of the King’s own household, who had insisted on dispatching a Chengdean force on an ill-conceived reconnaissance south to the siege lines, sending a group that had been at once too large to avoid detection, and too small to engage in serious battle. They had been lost almost to a man, and at a personal cost to Cyril that had been far too high to pay. Hughes’s man had slunk back to Chevagia, and Cyril never received as much as a word of condolence.
That had been three months ago, and it had been something of a tipping point for the Duke, moving him decidedly toward something he had been considering for a few years but only ever spoken of with one other person. On the dark night that the body of Sir Lucas Towsan had returned home to Chengdea in a wagon, the Duke had spoken of his thoughts to a third person, Lucas‘s father. A few more knew of it by now though nothing had yet been done about it, apart from Cyril allowing his nobles to come to the realization in their own time that they, the Chengdeanese, were very much alone.
As evening approached on the Eighth Day of Ninth Month and the nobles began to discuss dinner as much as the defense of the Duchy a servant handed the Duke a folded note, one name and a few words scribbled on embossed castle stationary. Cyril excused himself, clapped a somber baron on the shoulder, and made to leave the chamber. Everyone stood to attention and the Duke gave all a nod, but he met the eyes of one thin old knight in particular and beckoned for the man to join him.
Knight-Baron Gideon Towsan, head of Cyril’s Household Guard, was a foot taller than his Duke and some fifteen years older. Despite having the close-cropped gray hair and tidy triangular beard suitable for the generation of Daulmen leaving their fifties, it was Towsan who had to shorten his long stride to walk beside his Duke, as Cyril was of a broad and slightly bow-legged build that marked his Kantan ancestry by way of Orstaf. The Duke’s brown hair was worn short as well, but he had gamely followed the present Daulic style by wearing a flared moustache and allowing his beard to grow long, but only from his chin, and binding it with silver wire.
“Pagette,” Cyril said a name as the two men marched down the long hall to the portal connecting the throne room to the upper courtyard of Chengdea’s castle, high on the northern-most hills of the city.
“He has found another…possibility?” Towsan asked carefully. The two nobles passed by uniformed spearman at the wide door who briskly saluted their Duke and commander. Cyril nodded to both the guards and the question. Towsan eyed the men to make sure their chain mail was immaculate, their gold and green tabards bright and without wrinkle.
Cyril and Towsan crossed the grass of the open courtyard passing under trees and around a great central dais mounting an enormous bell as old as the realm, the bronze so green it looked like jade. A mallet hung from the crossbar as a striker though the bell was so old the castle staff thought the thing might shatter if it was ever struck.
“Adventurers,” Cyril muttered. “Dunderheads bound for disaster in Vod’Adia. I cannot believe I have countenanced this plan.”
Safely beneath his own brush of moustache, Towsan smiled faintly. The present incarnation of this stage of the plan had not been conceived by Cyril, but rather by the one person the Duke had never been able to deny. Not since her mother had died.
The thought of death took all traces of a smile from Towsan’s face. His wound was too fresh.
The south side of the high courtyard gave down a ramp into another, and the citadel wall separating the two was thick enough that rooms were housed within it. A guard standing at attention next to a plain door saluted smartly. Cyril thanked and dismissed him, and opened the door himself.
The room was used for extra storage, with rolled carpets wedged next to a stack of ale kegs and a rack of spears. A lantern hung from the ceiling and Pagette was examining the ends of the carpet rolls in its light when the Duke and Towsan strode in.
Pagette turned and made a flouncey bow, ruffling the frilled cuffs of a silk shirt worn under an embroidered waistcoat. His hair was slicked down with some sort of pomade Cyril and Towsan could smell in the small room. He referred to the Duke and Knight-Baron properly in impeccable High Daulic as Your Grace and Your Lordship, Sir.
“What are they this time?” Cyril rumbled without preamble. “Green Hill musketmen? Tarthan priests of the Sword Maiden?”
Pagette beamed, his gold tooth catching the light along with the trove of rings glittering his fingers.
“A Miilarkian,” he said. “A young and rather pretty one at that.”
Cyril raised a brown eyebrow and Towsan frowned.
“An Islander?” said Cyril.
“A woman?” said Towsan.
“Yes, and yes. She has a Codian sell-sword with her, but otherwise travels alone.”
“Wait,” Cyril held up a hand. “She is a merchant of some kind? Traveling alone?”
“I do not believe so, your Grace, as she has no goods with her.”
“Pagette,” Towsan said. “She did not happen to be wearing a night-black cloak of a triangular cut, did she?”
“Ah, no your Lordship, sir. Though she did have something like that rolled up behind her saddle.”
“A Guilder?” Duke Cyril nearly sputtered, then raised his eyes toward the beams of the ceiling as though imploring help from the heavens beyond them.
“Good night, Pagette,” he said sourly, “Better luck the morrow. For the record, I am not particularly interested in thieves and assassins.”
Pagette looked modestly offended. “Pardon, your Grace, but strictly speaking the Guilders of Miilark are neither of those two things. Not precisely.”
“Bloody well close enough,” Towsan growled.
“My lords,” Pag
ette said, then snapped his mouth shut as the note of exasperation that had crept into his voice had been obvious even to him. “Forgive me, your Grace, and your Lordship, Sir. But might I perhaps speak plainly?”
“Please,” Cyril said, causing Towsan to glance at him. The Duke, perhaps because of his unorthodox upbringing, did have a tendency to treat in too familiar a fashion with commoners. The Duchess Jasmine had never been able to fully cure him of the habit.
Pagette held out his bejeweled hands. “Your Grace, owing to the siege of Larbonne there are not so many Vod’Adia-bound adventurers moving through your domains this season, and none of those who do come this way are paladins, or cavaliers, or people, in all honesty, of reputable circumstance. The better classes are going through Souterm and the Codian Empire. Those we get here are Kantans and Rivenmen moving overland, and a variety of ne’er-do-wells who either slipped around the siege or else were allowed through by the Ayzants as they look like trouble. The pickings, your Grace, are slim.”
Cyril was frowning, and Towsan knew why. Despite the rough nature of the heavily armed men and women who had come through Chengdea in the last few months, there were many among them who might have been convinced to hire on in the Duchy’s service, at least for a season, to bolster the defenses. If there had been any money left in the treasury, that is.
Pagette continued.
“My liege, time is not our friend. Vod’Adia will be Open in a few weeks, and Closed only a month after that. The adventurers, loaded with treasure or not, do not linger in the Wilds and the Shugak close the road behind them for the next ninety-nine years. In little more than two months there will be no route through the wilderness. Larbonne is already lost to us.” The man turned to look at Towsan. “If your Lordship, Sir, is still decided and resolute, you have to go now.”
“But with an Island Guilder?” Cyril said, though it was a question now and not a denial.
“Just so,” Pagette nodded. “As I say, she is a young woman and in truth not so formidable in appearance, but the reputation of her people proceeds her. If you two noble men are, forgive me, intimidated by the name of Miilark, may not the same be expected from the Shugak, and even from the rough crowd of Camp Town? There is no percentage in meddling with an Islander, for the Islanders never forget. Is there anyone in the world who has not heard this said?”
Cyril was quiet, thoughtful. Towsan spoke to Pagette.
“Does this young Guilderess mean to enter Blackstone? What is her goal?”
“I cannot say, sir, though I do not think Vod’Adia is her objective. Her sell-sword did purchase a one-man license on the docks with Island bank notes, and the pair of them booked passage on the next wug raft to put-out, probably in a few days.”
“Why else would she be going to Camp Town if she is not a merchant?”
Pagette shrugged, but the Duke had seen something. His dark eyes narrowed at the gaudy trader.
“You may not know, Pagette, but you have suspicions. You have that sort of a brain.”
The man lifted a hand as though to run it over his head, but remembering his slick pomade he only feathered his fingers above his hair.
“Well. I did hear a bit of talk between her and her man. There was something of an implication that she, well, does mean to…do a certain amount of harm to some fellow traveling ahead of her.”
Towsan snorted. “But Guilders are not assassins? Not precisely?”
Pagette sighed. “Yes. Well. Your Lordship, Sir, I must say again, what does it matter to us if she is? Have I misapprehended your purpose in seeking to travel in the manner intended? As I understood it your only wish is for security from here to Camp Town. Once there you can avail yourself of the hospitality of the Jobian priests, and your need for an escort is ended. If this Miilarkian wishes to go kill some fellow, or even to try the Sable City, what of it? Your need for her ends before either is an issue.”
“You are sure the Codian Priests have a temple at Camp Town this year?” Cyril asked, for it was a point to which he often returned.
“Absolutely your Grace, I have confirmed it time and again with the Shugak. They have raised an entire pyramid, of wood of course and not stone, and are operating it as a sort of hospice.” Pagette turned to Towsan. “It will be the most distinctive structure in Camp Town, I expect, for the Jobians put up a far better class of building than the Shugak, gods know. Not the sort of thing every breeze threatens to topple.”
Cyril was quiet for a time and Towsan gave his Duke the silence to think. Pagette waited on tenterhooks, not bothering to conceal his eagerness. The man was a native Chengdean and while no more of his Duke’s plan had been explained to him than was absolutely necessary, he did possess the sort of brain that would have figured it all out by now. Pagette surely understood that the fate of the Duchy could well be in the balance, though Towsan suspected that the light in his eyes had still more to do with the substantial payment he had been promised than with any sense of local patriotism.
Cyril finally sighed. “Where is this pretty assassin now?”
“The Stars and Stones on the docks,” Pagette said. “She and her man took two rooms as it is the only inn not stuffed to the rafters with refugees. Not at the pretty penny the owner is still charging.”
“That innkeeper has no soul,” Towsan muttered. Pagette shrugged.
“But he has stacks and stacks of silver. Many are the men who will make that trade.”
“Arrange a meeting, Pagette,” Cyril said. “Let us say, in three hours.”
The man bowed deeply, still smiling, and was quickly out the door and gone. Cyril made no move to leave the room right away so Towsan waited beside him.
“I should bring Claudja,” the Duke said. “She has a good eye for people.”
“She always did, your Grace.”
Cyril looked at his oldest vassal and opened his mouth as though to apologize, which would have been a mortification for Towsan. Instead the Duke only reached out and squeezed the knight’s narrow shoulder with a strong hand. Towsan lowered his eyes.
Cyril looked out the open door at the sky above the courtyard walls, somber blues and purples starting to play across the undersides of clouds.
“Sunset,” Cyril said. “I know where she will be. Would you like to come, Gideon?”
“Not tonight, your Grace.”
Cyril nodded, and clapped Towsan’s shoulder. The Duke turned and left, and after a moment the old knight reached up to the hanging lantern and flicked open the tiny door. He licked a thumb and finger and snuffed out the light, then stood alone in the darkening room until his face was set and expressionless, before striding out himself.
Cyril went back into the main citadel but moved widely around the throne room through side passages typically only used by servants. He passed several of the familiar household staff who stepped aside and nodded rather than bowed. The Duke had never been comfortable with a great deal of formality when no one else was around.
He wound through a closed kitchen and at one point had to take a staircase up to the ducal apartments, and then another one back down. He was bound for a detached courtyard on the same level as the main upper yard, but which was accessible only from above.
As Cyril stepped back outside he was chilled by a northern breeze he had not felt in the enclosed courtyard within the citadel. This yard was far smaller, just a wide L-shaped walkway jutting from the northeast corner above a sheer cliff, which made defensive works redundant. Instead there was only a low stone wall enclosing an area of paving stones interrupted by regular squares of bare dirt, a few sprouting saplings but most of which were beds that would wait until spring before flowering.
The view was among the best in the castle above the city, for none of Chengdea itself could actually be seen. From here the citadel seemed to float in the sky high above checkerboard farm fields stretching east and the Black River flowing in from the north, with the tangled murk of the Vod Wilds to the west safely across the wide water. The spot was parti
cularly beautiful at sunset but Cyril scarcely noticed the gorgeous sky, for his daughter was sitting on a stone bench and to him she was the most beautiful thing in the world. He had a case to make.
Claudja Perforce, Duchess of Chengdea, had inherited her mother’s looks along with her title. Her features were fine, actually exquisite, with a delicate nose and mouth that only seemed a trifle small for the largeness of her steel gray eyes. She had Jasmine’s pale skin, wholly without blemish, but from Cyril and the Balabushevych’s once of Orstaf she had dark, slashing eyebrows and a mass of brown hair tumbling about narrow shoulders for her frame was slight. She was dressed as she had been for three months all in the black of mourning, plain dress, coat, and a scarf. She sat on the edge of the bench with her spine as straight as a ramrod, and before her was a square gap in the pavement from which no flowers would ever grow again, for it was the grassy mound of a grave. The name on the stone marker said only Sir Lucas but it was inscribed beneath the carved coat of arms of the Towsan family. The Knight-Baron’s holdings were on Chengdea’s eastern edge, and it was there that the Towsans had rested for five hundred years. It was there that someday Sir Gideon’s bones would lie, and later those of his elder two sons. But the old knight had acceded to the Duchess Claudja’s gentle wish that the youngest of the family would lie here, on the spot where Lucas had proposed marriage, and Claudja had accepted.
Seeing her, Claudja’s father felt like an intruder. Her small size did not add to Cyril’s grudging awareness that his only child was a young woman now of twenty-four years, and that the things weighing on her were grown-up matters. Not the kinds of things that a father’s hug could ever banish. He could still tell her now that everything would be fine but since Jasmine’s death neither of them could believe that as they might have, once. Now with Lucas gone, the fine young man who Claudja had looked at from the beginning in the same way Jasmine had come to look at Cyril in time, the father feared that their daughter might never come to feel that way again.
Claudja had heard the door and she turned to look up at her father. The light of dusk was gentle on her face. She smiled faintly with her mouth but not her eyes, and there was no joy in it. Cyril walked toward her slowly, setting his heavy feet softly for every scuff seemed an interruption of his daughter’s private grief. Claudja rose and with a last look back turned away from the cold headstone. She met Cyril halfway and her dry eyes narrowed as she looked at his face.
“Some news?” she asked.
“Pagette,” Cyril said, and found he had to clear his throat.
Claudja lifted her chin, for her father was much taller.
“Has he found someone?” she snapped, suddenly all business.
“Perhaps,” Cyril said without enthusiasm. “There is a Miilarkian taking passage shortly. A young woman Guilder.”
“Wahine Guild awarhe?” Claudja said, for she spoke the Trade Tongue with full fluency as befitted the female head of a noble Daulic household. Cyril’s command of that language was spotty, though he had gotten her drift.
“That is what Pagette thinks.”
Claudja looked somewhere into the breeze and she blinked once or twice though her gaze remained steely. Her mother had looked just the same when she was thinking, and it had never taken either of them very long to get where their mind was going.
“That’s perfect,” Claudja said. “When may I meet her?”
“We may head down into the city at any time.”
Claudja nodded crisply and turned for the stairs back up to the apartments. Cyril looked and then called after her, and she turned.
“Claudja, I…I still do not like this plan. There are other ways to reach the Codians. There are others who could be sent.”
Cyril’s daughter looked over her shoulder at him, then turned and marched back. In the dying light there was a sudden coldness in her eyes that Cyril had never seen in her mother’s, though he recognized it all the same. He had seen it often enough in the hard gaze of his own father, the first Duke of Chengdea, Perforce.
“There is no time to establish relations and exchange ambassadors,” Claudja said. “The Codians must know that we are serious, and they must know it immediately.” She lifted her chin again. “So long as I am Duchess of Chengdea no more of our men shall die for the incompetence of that man.”
The vehemence with which Claudja spoke the last two words as always gave Cyril a start, for since Lucas Towsan had died following the orders of Hughes III, King of Daul, Claudja had referred to their rightful liege in no other way.
Cyril nodded. Claudja turned away only a moment before her look would have amounted to staring her father down, then strode deliberately back inside. It was another moment before Cyril followed.
Chapter Nineteen
The Sable City Page 35