by M. C. Planck
Published 2015 by Pyr, an imprint of Prometheus Books
Gold Throne in Shadow. Copyright © 2015 by M. C. Planck. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or conveyed via the Internet or a Web site without prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
The characters, products, and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, or existing product names is coincidental and is not intended by the author.
Cover design by Nicole Sommer-Lecht
Cover illustration © Gene Mollica
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The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Planck, M. C.
Gold throne in shadow / M. C. Planck.
pages ; cm. — (World of prime)
ISBN 978-1-63388-096-2 (softcover) — ISBN 978-1-63388-097-9 (ebook)
I. Title.
PR9616.4.P56G65 2015
823'.92—dc23
2015015521
Printed in the United States of America
CONTENTS
1. Reflections
2. Interviews
3. Return of the Priest
4. Changing Wizards
5. Major Tom
6. Hard Duty
7. Welcome to the Jungle
8. A Night on the Town
9. Defeat from the Jaws of Victory
10. Trouble in Bed
11. Fortress of Solitude
12. Dogfight
13. A Shocking Experience
14. King’s Cross
15. Midsummer Night’s Dream
16. Bar Brawls and Betrayals
17. Continuing Education
Acknowledgments
About the Author
1
REFLECTIONS
Christopher stood in front of the mirror, naked, admiring Krellyan’s handiwork. The dents of a lifetime were erased, washed away by the power of the Saint’s magic, leaving his skin smooth and unwrinkled. Too smooth: he had no calluses on his hands or feet. He’d have to be careful until he made new ones.
But now he had that ageless look that the elite of the Kingdom shared. Inside he was still a forty-year-old man. On the outside he could pass for twenty-something. The magic hadn’t made him any stronger or faster than he had been. The hardness under his skin was earned the old-fashioned way, the profit of surviving the arduous lifestyle of this world. The reflexes he had cultivated in twenty years of amateur hobby had been honed by a year of deadly serious craft. But the scars he had also gained were gone. The regeneration had kept the good and replaced the bad.
With a trivial exception, one easily corrected with ordinary cosmetic surgery. Christopher wasn’t about to suffer through that needlessly—it was a decision he’d leave to his wife, when he saw her again. The indiscriminate regeneration spell had replaced all of his missing flesh.
And it was starting to look like when, not if. He was no longer a lonely, penniless wayfarer lost on a strange world. The lost and strange remained, but now he had allies, an army, and bags of money. Most importantly, the bargain he had made with the god Marcius made sense to him. This world needed a good shaking up, a transfer in the balance of power. The people on the bottom needed more, at the expense of the people on top, and Christopher had just the lever to do it. They had said in the Wild West, “God didn’t make men equal, Samuel Colt did.” On this world, it would be Crazy Pater Christopher and his buckets of dirt that made men equal. The nobles had tael, the source of magic and unnatural vitality that made a man as hard to kill as an elephant. Now the commoners would have elephant guns.
“If you are finished admiring yourself, we have business to discuss,” Cardinal Faren said from the doorway. The great Cathedral in Kingsrock had a number of plainly furnished cells for the use of traveling priests. This was not one of them. They had put Christopher in the most luxurious room in the Cathedral, normally reserved for visiting nobles recovering from some horrific disease or injury. The height of luxury was signified by the private fireplace and a full-length mirror. Other than that, the room had what a charitable description could only call “rustic charm.”
An objective description would be “medieval primitiveness,” but Christopher was used to that by now.
“Why haven’t you had this done?” Christopher asked while stepping into trousers.
“I do not require it, save for vanity. Which is better served by signs of wisdom.” The old man’s crinkled face was framed by a full head of carefully coiffed white hair. This world shared the usual fetish for the young and beautiful, but it also had a strong veneration for the old. Especially old men. Not many men around here lived to be old.
“What business?” Christopher finished dressing by hanging his sword at his side. It was like putting on a necktie; he felt slightly naked without it in any formal situation.
“You’re rich,” Faren said. “We need to talk about how we’re going to spend your money.”
Saint Krellyan was waiting for them in his private chambers, deep in the heart of the Cathedral. The Saint’s age was problematic. Chronologically he was about the same age as Christopher; physically he looked half of that, but his eyes seemed even older than Faren’s.
“Rank is uppermost on my mind,” Krellyan said. “You must promote yourself. Your assassin still lurks, and as a lowly first-rank you are much too easy to kill. You cannot serve under Lord Nordland anymore and expect to survive your term of service. Nor would you be likely to find any friendlier assignment.”
“But as a fifth-rank, you can take command of the draft levee in your own right,” Cardinal Faren pointed out. “You will be a legitimate member of the peerage, vastly harder to kill, and protected by your own loyal army. I am not certain that will be enough, yet I am certain any less guarantees you will not survive the next three years. And I think your men will need your protection as much as you need theirs.”
The Saint put a lump of bright-purple tael on the desk. It represented over half of Christopher’s newfound wealth.
“This will advance you to the rank of Curate,” Krellyan said. “It will take at least four days for your rank to fully manifest, so you should begin now. You have already lost three weeks, and I think you have little time to spare.”
Christopher had not sought rank, privilege, command over others; he had only wanted to go home. But he had a job to do, and doing it would require him to accept certain responsibilities, not least of which was surviving. And the men who had stood and fought for him while Nordland fled would not be any more popular with the lord than he was.
He picked up the lump and put it in his mouth, where it dissolved like flavorless cotton candy. Over the next few days it would integrate itself into his brain. After that, the only way to get it out again would be to kill him and boil his head.
There were plenty of people who wouldn’t have a problem with doing that. The people who had tortured him, smashing his legs into bone meal and driving nails through his eyes, weren’t even the top of the list. His assassin, that nameless woman who had stalked him almost since he had arrived, who had illicitly interceded in his state-sponsored “interrogation” by crushing his teeth and his genitals with a hammer, wasn’t the top of the list either. She wanted him to suffer too much to just be dead.
But Lord Nordland, and perhaps the entire ruling class of the realm, would be more than relieved to drop his head in a kettle and finally be done with his trouble-making. They’d already tried it once.
But they had failed. Well, not failed, strictly speaking. He hadn’t survived the torture. Driven to utter despair by pain, he’d used his last spell to commit suicide, killing himself with his own magic. He had his assassin to thank for that mistake on their part, but he wasn’t feeling particularly grateful. After that they had boiled his head. And worse.
“Three weeks? But why?” Christopher demanded. A week was ten days here, so it was a whole month by Christopher’s calendar.
“Why not three thousand?” Faren answered. “Knowing Krellyan’s power, they should have burned your body to ash. Instead we found your empty skull on our doorstop.”
“A gruesome gift, however welcome,” Krellyan said.
“There is more good news,” Faren said. “They did not find you guilty of treason, which would have forbidden us from bringing you back. They did not officially keep your body past ordinary hope of revival or officially mutilate your corpse. So you are legally free to continue your improbable career.”
“Speaking of which, I wish to know what your intentions are,” Krellyan stated. “You may rest here for a few days, until your rank asserts itself. Then you must go back into the world. What will you do then?”
“Faren is right,” Christopher said. “I have to accept responsibility for the men. How do I do that?”
“You petition the King,” Faren answered, in his capacity as the Church’s top legal officer. “Normally the Church does not intervene in the assignment of our draft regiment, save to make sure it goes to a Bright. In this case we will.”
“Nordland will be offended, again,” Krellyan sighed, “when you snatch his regiment out from under him.”
“It can’t be helped,” Faren said, dismissing the problem with a wave of his hand. “After that, you petition the King for a posting. He will send you to some county on the edge of the Kingdom. We cannot exercise any influence on that decision.”
“He won’t send me back to Nordland’s county, will he?” Christopher asked.
“I have no idea,” Faren said. “He will send you where he feels you are most needed. Or at least, he is supposed to. I am certain that politics influence the decision, and I am equally certain those political channels are open only to our enemies and not to us. Wherever he sends you, you must make the best of it.”
“And try not to draw attention to yourself,” Krellyan said, although his tone of voice revealed little hope. Christopher bit his tongue, unable to speak without committing blatant dishonesty. He intended to cause far more trouble than anyone could have guessed. He knew they hadn’t guessed it, because if they had, he’d already be dead. Again.
2
INTERVIEWS
Christopher’s regiment had long since returned to their training camp in the village of Burseberry. He was eager to join them, but the four-day wait was unavoidable, and in any case he needed some time in the Cathedral’s library. He had a career’s worth of magic theory to catch up on.
And of course, he had to face the King.
“You must go alone,” Faren told him, angry at his own helplessness. “We dare not be seen supporting you so openly. All we have done so far is to heal and revive your men, at your own expense.” That had taken another quarter of his fortune. It was an expenditure he did not regret.
It was sorrowful, though, that eighty men could be brought back from the dead for half the expense of promoting one man to a moderate rank. It put the cost of his success into perspective and revealed the sharp edge of this world: power, yes, but not without price.
He was reminded of the personal price when the carriage arrived to ferry him to his appointment. It was the same vehicle that had delivered him into torture and death, agonies still vivid and recent, only a few days old from his frame of reference. After a shamefully brief battle, his stomach betrayed him, and he threw up in the rosebushes by the curb of the Cathedral.
Faren stood by, scowling in anger, but not at Christopher. “You need not accept this insult,” he growled. The coachman was careful to remain stone-faced and unmoving, and yet his smirk hung in the air, summoned perhaps by sheer inevitability.
Christopher stood up, wiped his mouth. This was not the hardest thing he had ever done. He had walked into a hospital room once and told his mother that she was going to die because the doctors had done everything in their power and failed. “You have to beat this one on your own,” he had said, knowing it was impossible, knowing that she knew it too. After that, nothing else had ever seemed to deserve being called “hardest.”
Ignoring the quavering in his limbs, he climbed into the down-at-heel carriage. As the coachman shut the door, the invisible smirk faded like the worn window curtains. Courage was a concrete quantity here, like gold and iron. Injury and even death could be overcome with magic, on this wondrous and distant world; fear remained obdurate.
There was a time when he had gazed up at this city with curiosity and even desire, but that allure was dead now, buried under memories of torture. The close city streets and tall buildings no longer seemed friendly and familiar. They had become hostile, wedded to the establishment that abandoned him to his enemies. Even the magnificence of the Cathedral was tainted, a white blossom lying in the dirt, spoiled by muddy footprints.
The city crammed twenty thousand people onto a spire of rock sticking up from the surrounding farmlands. Those inhabitants watched Christopher’s carriage incuriously, while he watched them with silent disdain. The towns run by the Church did not tolerate this kind of poverty, uncleanliness, and petty brutality.
Every town was short on men, having buried half of every generation on distant battlefields. But here in the city Christopher saw an abundance, the detritus left over after the thresher, boys warped and twisted by violence into men who could never return to a pastoral life.
The castle was impressive, as castles go, with soldiers of precision and dispatch manning the gates, bright pennants snapping in the wind, a solid projection of strength and defense against the monsters that roamed this world. But Christopher could see only the dungeons it hid in its depths.
This time he entered by the main hall, and his escort of blank-faced soldiers took him directly to throne room. This time there would be no sudden darkness of a sleep spell. Christopher’s new rank put him beyond such simple measures. If they wanted to kill him now, he could put up a fight.
But not against the King. Although tael was invisible, the King’s power was palpably radiant in the graceful way his brawny frame glided across the floor, the tael-enhanced reflexes obvious even in the way his fine fur cloak draped about him. The Saint was a giddying twelfth-rank, which put him two or three steps above the heads of other Churches; the King was one above that, the highest rank in the realm. Krellyan was a healer and could make bodies whole and living from a fingernail; Treywan was a warrior and, it had been patiently explained to Christopher until he signaled that he believed it, could defeat an entire regiment single-handedly.
If you let him use both hands, they added, he could quite likely defeat every unranked soldier in the Kingdom. All at once.
At least, that had been true when men had fought with swords and shields. Christopher’s regiment had rifles and cannons. He was quite certain the King did not understand what that meant, and he was equally certain that failure of understanding was the only thing that would let him walk out of here alive.
He went to one knee on the plush green-and-gold carpet and bowed his head, the most elaborate protocol demanded in this prickly world where the man in rags just might be a powerful wizard with poor sartorial taste. The King finished his discussion with the courtiers lounging around the map table before dismissing them off to distant corners of the room. It was a farce, since the hall was staffed with guards and no doubt various magical observations, but the interview could n
ow be less formal. For the King, that is; for Christopher, frankness and comfort were unimaginable.
“You don’t look that different.” Treywan’s voice was strong, but it had the beer-and-football bluster Christopher had always rolled his eyes at. Not here, of course. Christopher pictured the King speaking to him from atop a modern battle-tank, and decided the King could sound like whatever he wanted.
“Different than what, my lord?”
“Different than any other priest. And yet, you’ve caused more uproar than a sack of dragons.”
“I apologize, my lord. That was not my intent.”
“Nonsense,” the King guffawed, with an undercurrent of menace. “Your cleverness has paid off. You’ve gone from first- to fifth-rank in less than a year. An impressive advance. You are to be commended on your initiative.”
“Thank you, my lord,” Christopher said automatically, before feeling the thinness of the ice under his feet.
“I didn’t say I was going to commend you,” mused the King. “I got no profit from your rise. That purple-tongued Cardinal of yours argued me out of my share. Said you had no commission, so I should look to Nordland and his commission for my cut. I almost did; if Nordland had taken his due from you, I would have taken mine from him. But the good Duke is too wroth to speak your name, let alone come and beg his tael from you.”
Christopher could only blush in embarrassment and anger. It was not his fault that Nordland had abandoned him. It wasn’t even Nordland’s fault, really. The man had made the best decision, given what he knew. Unfortunately the Duke had not understood black-powder weaponry any better than the King did.
“Now that you are fifth-rank,” the King said, “your Cardinal suggests that I give you a commission in your own right, so that I might never again be cheated out of my tax. To me it seems rather like closing the barn door after the horse is already at the neighbor’s. Though if your meteoric ascent is not yet burnt out, perhaps I can still get some service out of you.”
Christopher was not sure how to answer this. He did not want to appear to threaten the King with boasts of exploits to come. At the same time, he wanted that commission. He ignored the fact that his destruction of an army of monsters should be counted as service to the Kingdom. He knew by now that the King, indeed every noble in the land, would not see it that way. There were always armies of monsters to destroy. One more or less could hardly be counted as an achievement.