“Perfect.”
“Don’t worry, partner,” Reichis chittered. “I’ll smother him with my noble fur.”
The part of me that wanted to kick the squirrel cat was still just so grateful that he was alive that all I could say was, “That stopped being funny about three minutes ago.”
“Not to me. Maybe you need a dashing snout to get it?”
“Arex, you girlish little snot,” Leonidas boomed. “Come to worm your way around court, eh?”
Arex’s response was unlike anything I’d seen in him so far. It was, well, polite. In the extreme. “My Lord Major Leonidas,” Arex said, no hint of accent or affect in his voice at all. “The empire rests safely under your watch, and the court shines brighter for your presence!”
“See what I said?” Leonidas commented to his entourage. “A worm, come in search of dirt in which to burrow.”
“We all serve as we may, lord major,” Arex replied humbly.
Leonidas strode forward and looked at Arex. They were both big men, roughly the same height. “Look at you, Arex. You’re big enough to be a soldier. What’s the problem, eh? Made of fragile stuff?” Leonidas drove a fist into Arex’s stomach, or at least pretended to. Arex stumbled back convincingly, but I suspected it was for show.
“My lord major, I implore you not to scare me like that!”
Leonidas laughed. “Ah, come here, you big coward.”
Part of me was confused by Arex’s sudden transformation into a sycophantic servant. Watching him get pushed around by Leonidas appealed to my sense of revenge for the way he’d manipulated me earlier, but I suspected this was some kind of act.
Leonidas gave Arex a rough embrace, designed to look as if they were old friends. Or perhaps they were, and the show was for me? Hells. “How am I supposed to survive a whole day of this?” I muttered.
“Go back to stabbing people in the kidneys,” Reichis chittered amiably in reply.
“And what have we here?” Leonidas asked. “Someone let an animal into the queen’s court?”
“That overstuffed skinbag puts a hand on me and he’s a dead man,” Reichis warned.
“It is a squirrel cat, my lord major,” Arex said patiently. “I believe it is a type of large domesticated rodent.”
Reichis gave a low growl that told me I was going to have to grab hold of him any second now, and that I was going to walk away from this morning with bite marks all over my nice new shirt.
Leonidas looked at Reichis with a bemused expression. “That ugly little hamster? No, I was talking about this other animal here.” He pointed at me.
“This would be Kellen, the queen’s new tutor,” Arex explained. “You weren’t here for his arrival yesterday.”
Leonidas nodded. “Quite a story, if the tale is true—which it never is around here. You look Jan’Tep. Is that so?”
I nodded.
“Feeble bastards,” he said. “And what’s that filth around your eye? Someone punch you in the face already?”
“No, major, that’s just an affectation from the east where I travelled as a child.”
Leonidas looked at me with a sneer on his face. “Lying little chit, isn’t he?” he commented to Arex. “That’s the shadow-black, isn’t it, boy?”
Boy? He wasn’t more than five years older than me.
“Saw a fellow with the demon’s plague once,” he went on. “Not a Jan’Tep like you, but a proper Daroman. Had the markings all over his face. Lived as an exile in the hills. The villagers drove him away when he was a boy and used his name to scare their children into doing their chores.”
I looked around absently.
“Need something?” Arex asked me quietly.
“Just looking for a knife,” I said.
Leonidas overheard and laughed. “Ah, I’m just teasing you, o noble master of cards.” He threw an arm around my shoulders. “I’ve no doubt we’ll be best of friends one day. Isn’t that right, Arex?”
Arex opened his hands as if in supplication. “Any man would be honoured to call you friend, lord major.”
“Watch that one, boy,” Leonidas whispered in my ear. “He’s always up to something, and usually on the wrong side.” He withdrew his arm. “Ah, I see one of my men over there flirting with a woman above his station. Can’t have that.”
He turned to me briefly. “Goodbye for now, royal tutor.” Then he nodded to Arex. “Worm. I’ll see you when I next need someone’s tongue to clean my boots.”
“Don’t look now, Kellen,” Reichis chittered up to me as the major strode away, “but I think that guy’s sweet on you.”
That seemed unlikely, but at least he hadn’t challenged me to a duel. Or arm-wrestling or belly-butting or whatever it was they did here to demonstrate their suitability as warriors. “How did that go?” I asked Arex.
“Not that well. I was hoping he’d ignore you. This is worse.”
“Great. How many more of these do we have to do?”
“Best take a deep breath, kid. It’s going to be a long day.”
14
A Tutor’s First Lesson
Those next few hours were a non-stop series of breaches of etiquette, false starts, near misses and overall embarrassments. Court days were, it turned out, interminably long, comprised of a sequence of meals and interviews and—once those were done—hideous rituals of group gesticulations which the Daroman nobility referred to as “courtly dancing”. It was late evening by the time I got to bed, and I vowed to sleep for the next three days.
I made it barely an hour before midnight when someone knocked at my door. “Master Kellen! Master Kellen!” The woman outside my room was whispering so loudly I felt as if I needed to explain how sound works.
I sighed and opened my eyes. Reichis was lying stretched out against my side, the way he does sometimes when we’ve been apart for a while. If you saw him that way you’d almost think he liked me. “Get up,” I said, poking his furry belly.
The squirrel cat growled. “Don’t you need all your fingers for spellslinging?”
“Somebody’s at the door. Are they here to kill me?”
He sniffed. “Female. Adult. Horny.”
Ech. Those words have a lot more appeal when they’re not being chittered at you by a grumpy squirrel cat.
I got up and opened the door. Karanetta was on the other side. “Master Kellen—”
“Mister,” I said, rubbing the sleep from my eyes. “Just ‘Mister’.” Only Jan’Tep who pass their trials and are granted a mage’s name are addressed as “Master”. I didn’t qualify.
“Koresh and Arrasia, they’ve come back. They’re in the palace, in their rooms!”
I nodded. Of course they’d come back. It would’ve been too easy if they’d stayed away, but they’d only been gone a day and so were still protected by their status as royal tutors. I tried to imagine a reason for their return that didn’t involve killing me, but there was no sense in delaying the inevitable. “It’s fine. I’ve got it covered.”
“They’ve got a man with them.” Her eyes went to the corridor outside the room even though it was empty. “I think he’s some kind of assassin.”
I found myself scrutinising Karanetta, searching for signs of deception. She was still in her nightclothes, long, blonde hair strewn across her shoulders. Anyone could tell she was terrified. “You only got two out of three,” I said to Reichis absently.
Karanetta’s eyes flickered from Reichis to me. “Are you…?”
“Just talking to myself,” I said.
The squirrel cat wandered over and sniffed at Karanetta’s leg. “Nope,” he said. “I got it right.”
“Mister Kellen, you’ve got to get out of here!” Karanetta said urgently.
“It’s okay, Reichis, you’re getting old. Things start to slip.”
“Perhaps you could hide. Perhaps…” Karanetta began.
“Wait for it…” Reichis chittered.
“They wouldn’t think to look for you in my room, would they?”
>
“… and squirrel cat one, humans zero,” Reichis chuckled, ambling back towards the bed.
Damn it.
“Karanetta, that’s, well, that’s very generous of you, but I couldn’t risk endangering your life like that. Besides, I’ll be fine. I can handle those two.”
“And the assassin?”
I nodded. “And the assassin. Go back to bed. Don’t worry about me.”
“But—”
“Trust me. It’s all just a misunderstanding. We’ll talk tomorrow. Over breakfast?”
She smiled shyly as I shunted her out of the room.
Once I had the door closed and locked again, Reichis hopped back up on the bed. “So, Koresh, Arrasia and a hired assassin,” the squirrel cat said excitedly.
“I think I can take Koresh.”
Reichis snorted. “He’s bigger than you, stronger than you and he smells like an ex-soldier to me.”
“What does an ex-soldier smell like?”
“Like someone who can beat you up in a fight.”
I scratched my head. I really should have had a more thorough plan before I’d threatened to kill them. “All right, put a pin in that one. Arrasia looks like she’d try to slip a knife in me when my back was turned.”
“Wrong again,” Reichis said. “She’s a poisoner. That I could smell for sure.”
Great. “All right, let’s focus on the assassin.”
“Oh, you don’t have to worry about the assassin.”
“Why not?”
Reichis did his best squirrel cat approximation of a smile. “Because I get the assassin.”
This is my life: run from all the people trying to kill me, while the two-foot-tall ball of furry insanity I call a business partner tries to murder everything in sight.
15
A Good Night’s Murder
I’d figured it was a safe bet that Koresh and Arrasia would be waiting for me in one of their rooms. After all, I’d threatened their lives; they were expecting me to make a move on them. This way they had control over the terrain.
The legendary warrior-poets of Berabesq theology will tell you that controlling the terrain is the surest way to victory. They’re full of crap. Surprise beats terrain every time.
Well, surprise and a lot of patience.
“He’s not coming,” I heard Arrasia say. “The coward’s probably halfway to the southern border by now.”
I could make out footsteps coming towards the door.
“Stop.” Koresh’s baritone voice resonated from the room.
“Why?” she asked.
“Because. I want him here, where we can control the situation.”
“Why didn’t we just take a dozen men and go kill him and be done with it?”
I heard something slam against the door. I hoped it was Arrasia.
“Fool. If we did anything so overt we’d play right into that little bitch’s hands. He’s a tutor, do you understand that? We need him to attack us. Besides, we’d lose face if we needed twelve men to deal with one itinerant card player.”
“But you need this… person?”
“Ugh,” Reichis chittered quietly at me. “Are they going to talk all night? I’m getting sleepy again.”
“Oleis is our insurance,” Koresh said. “Besides, he keeps our hands clean. Now sit down and shut up.”
“What about magic? The card player is Jan’Tep.”
I could practically hear the grin in Koresh’s voice. “Did you not see the way all but one of his tattooed bands have reverse glyphs imprinted on them? He’s an outcast. Probably the weakest mage they’ve ever produced. But just in case, I had my own Jan’Tep allies put abjuration spells around this whole wing. They didn’t even charge me. This Kellen isn’t very popular with his people.”
No kidding.
“I still don’t like this,” Arrasia complained. “The queen will demand explanations.”
“And who will give them to her? The card player will be gone and Karanetta will keep her mouth shut. No one will be able to touch us, and by the time I’m through with ‘Her Majesty’, she’ll know her place.”
A pause. “If we push her too far, Koresh, she’ll push back.”
Koresh’s laughter was as vile a sound as I’d ever heard. Maybe because it sounded so much like my own father’s. “Push back? We two know the one thing about her that could destroy her. The Daroman people may be sheep these days, but there are some crimes even they won’t tolerate. Why do you think she had to bring her Jan’Tep pet into the palace?”
“Are you not mad to speak of this in front of Oleis? An outsider? Use the truth to threaten the queen, of course, but if the secret really got out? Koresh, the empire would fall into chaos.”
“You seem to be afraid of chaos, Arrasia. I’m not.”
The voices became quiet and for a second I was afraid they knew I was there. But soon enough I heard murmurs and realised they must have moved out onto the balcony.
“Sir?” a tentative voice whispered from far away.
I looked up and saw a servant down the hall. No doubt wondering what I was doing sitting outside the room of one of the royal tutors.
I held a finger to my lips and padded over to him in my bare feet.
“Sir,” the servant said, whispering, “can I get anything for you?”
I shook my head. Then I thought about it. “I could do with a whisky. Not yet though.”
“Yes, sir, but if I may ask, when would you like it?”
I looked down at Reichis. He shrugged.
“Oh, in about ten minutes, I think.”
“Very good, sir. Can I clean that up for you?” The servant pointed at the little mess I’d made in front of Koresh’s quarters.
“No, it’ll take care of itself. Just the whisky. Or really anything that gets people good and drunk will do.”
The servant nodded. Then he looked at me carefully. “We all love the queen, sir,” he said. “If there’s anything else I can do to be of service…”
I held his gaze but said nothing.
He nodded again. “Very good, sir. Whisky in ten minutes.”
I clapped him silently on the shoulder and padded back to my spot at the door.
“Someone comes,” a man’s voice said through the door. It wasn’t Koresh, so I assumed it must be Oleis.
Ah, what the hells, I thought. I knocked, then backed up from the door until I hit the wall on the other side of the corridor. Then I thought better of it and stepped a foot to the side.
The door opened and a crossbow bolt embedded itself into the wall where I’d stood a moment before. Then Koresh stepped out, dropped the crossbow and drew a soldier’s short sword from his belt.
Damn it. I hate it when Reichis is right.
Koresh smiled like a starving man about to sit down to dinner. “Card player…”
“Stop!” I said, holding a handful of powder in my right hand. “One more step and you’ll face the insidious death magic of Kellen Argos, arch-lord of the seventh order of shadow, master mage of the Jan’Tep!”
Reichis looked up at me, disgusted. “You really can’t stop yourself, can you?”
A man in red cloth tried to step past Koresh to get at me, but the big man held him back. “No, he’s mine,” the tutor said.
Koresh brought his sword up into line and made it clear where he was going to put it as he began to slowly bridge the three-foot gap between us. “You stupid little boy,” he said. “You think we don’t know about magic here? Go ahead, try it. We had a true mage place abjuration wards all through this wing of the palace.”
“That’s too bad,” I said, holding up the black powder in my right hand for him to see. “Because the magic only lets me control the blast. The powder’s what does all the exploding.”
Koresh looked at me and then at my hand. “But… don’t you need two kinds to—”
I pointed to the floor where he was standing in a pile of red powder. “Should’ve left when I gave you the chance,” I said, and thr
ew the black powder into the red as I threw myself to the side.
There was a modest but still respectable explosion and Koresh went up like a torch. The assassin behind him fell back from the force of the blast. Arrasia was nowhere to be seen.
“Mine!” Reichis said, and raced into the room, jumping up onto the assassin’s face. I heard the man scream. It really doesn’t matter how many secret fighting arts you learn; they just don’t teach you how to fight squirrel cats in assassin school.
I entered the room behind him, careful not to get too close to Koresh’s still-smouldering corpse. Arrasia held a long, wicked-looking knife in her hand, waving it out in front of her. “Knife,” I said, happy to have been right for once. But Reichis was too busy skittering around, evading the assassin, who had his own blade and was doing a decent job of defending himself, despite the bloody socket where his right eyeball used to be. Reichis was savouring the aforementioned squishy sphere in his mouth as he dodged his opponent’s desperate lunges. The squirrel cat had been a monstrously cantankerous little bastard even before he got the shadowblack. I was starting to worry about just how evil he was going to become. That said, I had more pressing matters to concern myself with at that moment.
“You get one chance, Arrasia,” I warned the tutor. “I’m sure you’ve stuck that knife in a lot of people’s backs, but you miss me just once and it’s over for you.”
She waved the knife back and forth in a little arc. “You’re right,” she said, a smile creeping onto her lips. Then she spat in my face. A greenish-grey mist burned my skin. Even before I could scream, I felt all the muscles in my face go numb. Damn it, I thought as the poison set in. The little bugger was right again.
I kept my lips closed and held my breath to minimise how much of the toxin got inside me. It must’ve been some kind of paralytic, because my vision went blurry and I found myself falling to one side. Arrasia leaped forward to straddle me as I hit the ground. She brought the knife’s point to my throat. I tried to shout for Reichis, but my voice wasn’t working very well, and besides, when he’s got the blood lust like that, he’s good for pretty much nothing but eating human entrails. The worst part was that my vision was defogging, meaning the poison was already clearing from my system. If I’d had another few seconds I might have recovered.
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