Queenslayer

by Sebastien de Castell

  “Or a soldier,” I said.

  “Sure,” Reichis said. “Maybe.” Then he got up and started walking away, towards the stairs that led down and out of the palace.

  “Where are you going?”

  “You’ve wasted enough time satisfying your curiosity,” he said. “I’m a squirrel cat, not some pet dog. This is the part where we leave.”

  “You don’t think it matters that these guys might not be Zhuban at all? Cerreck said they weren’t wearing gloves. He was right too. None of these men has gloves on. Remember that Red Elite who attacked us back in the desert before all this started?”

  “The one with the… mind thing?” Reichis had his paws up and circling inward as if he were trying to strangle a rat.

  “The dehbru habat. He said that they could only touch the profane with special gloves.”

  “The ones who took the queen…”

  “No gloves, special or otherwise. There’s no way they were real Red Elites or holy assassins or anything of the kind.”

  “Fine. They’re impostors.” Reichis waved his paws around the room. “I think we’ve established that there’s a conspiracy. Can we go now?”

  “This could be important!”

  “What are you going to do? Tell the marshals you’ve uncovered a vast conspiracy because the assassins aren’t wearing gloves? This is your guilt talking, Kellen. It’s going to get you killed. Worse, it’s going to get me killed. You know what the difference is between the two of us in a fight, Kellen?”

  “This again? How about because I pick fights when I have to, and you do it all the time?”

  “No. The difference is you don’t commit. You try to be clever and outwit everyone. Even when someone’s trying to put a knife in your belly, you want them to see how smart you are. When a squirrel cat fights, he goes all in. He doesn’t look for trouble, but when it comes, he doesn’t hesitate. You hesitate, Kellen.”

  “What’s your point?”

  “My point is it’s time to choose. Either we get the hells out of here, or we take these skinbags down so hard they never get back up again. The queen’s gone, so all that’s left is revenge or escape. So what’s it going to be?”

  “I—”

  Reichis sniffed the air. “Someone’s coming.”

  I could hear footsteps. People running. “It’s probably just the marshals trying to re-establish order.”

  “Unless someone already sent them after us. You know, like in a conspiracy?”

  Perfect. “Come on,” I said, grabbing my saddlebags. We ran into one of the open rooms and I barred the door behind us.

  A few seconds later something slammed against the door and I opened my bags and tried to grab a few of the trinkets inside along with my powder ingredients. “The window,” I said to Reichis.

  The squirrel cat raced over and hopped up and out just as the door burst open. Four marshals with crossbows entered the room. “Don’t even try it,” one said as I started for the window. It was fifteen feet away. There was no way I could make it before he shot me.

  As I dropped my bags and put my hands up, I saw Reichis starting to creep back in.

  “Run, you idiot!” I shouted at him. “If we’re both caught, who the hell is going to get me out?”

  I could see the squirrel cat battling his own desire to fight, but reason won out. He leaped from the window and disappeared into the night.

  I breathed a sigh of relief. Not because I thought there was any way I could get out of this alive, but because at least I’d saved someone from dying on my account.

  “Kellen of the Jan’Tep, royal tutor of cards, you are under arrest for treason against the throne,” one of the marshals said, just before they started beating me.

  52

  Repentance

  They hung me from my wrists in a cell below the palace, every surface as grey as a marshal’s coat, and with only the barest light seeping in from the lanterns that hung from hooks in the corridor outside. Sometimes one of the marshals would press one of those lanterns against the skin of my chest or my cheek until I screamed. They’d tell me that Marshal Colfax was coming, and whatever they’d done to me was nothing compared to what the old man had planned. One of them told me he hated to watch any man suffer the way I surely would. He asked if I wanted him to slit my throat. When I said yes, he laughed. I guess I should’ve seen that coming.

  I didn’t hold out any hope of escaping this place. Reichis was gone though, and I tried to focus on that. The best friend I’d ever had in this life was free, which meant that the last act I’d ever commit of my own volition had been one of self-sacrifice. That felt like a suitable insult to Colfax and his white binder and all the rest of them.

  Unless Reichis screwed it all up and came back for me.

  Please, you greedy, egotistical, unsympathetic, treacherous little monster, run as far and as fast as you can. Find yourself a proper business partner who’ll help you steal and blackmail and murder your way to riches and happiness. While you’re at it, find yourself a mate and make loads of little Reichises. Ancestors know the world needs more squirrel cats.

  Lately Reichis had been talking about warm, tropical islands, even though I doubted he’d ever seen one. To his squirrel cat mind, a tropical island was like a softly padded stool in the middle of a giant warm bath. I could just imagine the tubby little bugger, lying on his back in some kind of hammock as servants dropped bits of butter biscuit into his gullet. The thought made me laugh out loud like an idiot. It also reminded me how hungry I was.

  They hadn’t fed me anything but sips of brackish water those first two days. I guess all those Daroman rules on the treatment of prisoners probably went out the window once the queen got dragged in her nightclothes into the darkness. I hadn’t eaten the day before either. It’s hard to imagine that you can hurt as much as I did and still be hungry, but even with my soul aching as badly as my body, I was famished. I should’ve felt ashamed about that.

  Somewhere out there was a girl just eleven years old, taken by men with no conscience, and it was my fault. Somewhere out there was another girl, whose name I didn’t know but whose body I had tried to defile, and that was my fault too. I thought about Mariadne. I wondered if the conspirators had killed her, or if they had simply captured her and would now use her the way Leonidas had planned. In the span of just a few days I had destroyed the lives of three women, and here in the darkness of my cell the feeling that clung to me hardest was simple hunger. I guess that’s why I noticed the smell.

  “Who’s there?” I croaked. My voice was wrecked. One of the marshals had punched me in the throat.

  The sound I heard was unexpected. A young woman’s cry. Soft hands stroked the sides of my face, “Oh, Kellen,” she whispered. “What have they done to you?”

  “Shalla?” I must’ve looked even worse than I thought if she was calling me Kellen.

  I felt something warm press between my lips. It was some kind of meat. I chewed at it desperately, but nearly retched when I tried to swallow.

  Her fingers flickered against my chest. “Anekh amun,” she intoned.

  Warmth spread throughout my body. I felt my throat loosening, and the itching, burning feeling on my face and chest slowly disappeared, along with much of the pain the marshals had inflicted on my arms and back. I imagined I still had the bruises, but even those felt less sore. Sha’maat could have been a powerful healer if she hadn’t turned her attentions to other arts. “Thank you,” I said.

  She put more food in my mouth and, after a few bites, water from a canteen that tasted as clear as open sky. After a few minutes I felt her arms around my torso. “I would do more for you if I could, brother. I would kill each and every one of them.” Her voice was soft and pained, like the yellow-haired girl I remembered. Only she’d stopped being that person ever since she’d come here.

  “Did Father send you?” I asked.

  I wondered what possible good I might be to him at this point. I certainly wasn’t in any positio
n to advance whatever political machinations my family had dreamed up. Then I realised she hadn’t answered me.

  “Shalla? If Father didn’t send you, why are you here?”

  “I can’t stay, brother. He is coming for you. The madman Colfax is on his way.”

  “So they keep telling me.”

  “He will try to break you, Kellen. You mustn’t let him. You must trick him.”

  A choked laugh escaped my lips. “Trick him? I think the time for tricks has passed, don’t you?”

  “Listen to me, brother: You have to outwit the marshal. You have to outwit them all.” She came closer. “I have brought you something,” she said carefully, as if she was afraid someone might be listening.

  “If you’re waiting for me to take it, I’m afraid my hands are otherwise occupied.”

  “They’ve brought your things into this cell. Your saddlebags and your clothes.”

  “My holsters?”

  “No,” she said. “Neither those or the silly…They kept your throwing cards as well.”

  “Then there’s nothing here that will help me.”

  “They left one other thing in your room, brother. The maid’s cards. I’ve put them in your saddlebags. I doubt they’ll even notice. But when the time comes, remember them.”

  “The deck I gave Tasia? What the hell am I supposed to do with that? If you were going to take such a risk, why not bring my powders?”

  “Please, brother, listen to me: the powders would do you no good. They would never let you near them. It is the cards you must consider. You can still outfox them all.”

  “Why?”

  I felt her hesitate. “No. I can go no further. Father will know. He…sometimes he uses his scrying cards to watch us…to watch me. This you must do on your own.”

  The knowledge that she’d disobeyed my father hit me as hard as any marshal’s mace. In our entire lives I’d never known my sister to directly flout his commands—not even when he was nothing more than a lord magus and the head of our household. Now that he was mage sovereign of the Jan’Tep territories?

  “Shalla, he’ll punish you for disobeying him. Whatever promises he’s made to you will disappear if he discovers you’ve gone against his wishes.”

  For just a moment, the cell was filled by the sound of a single terrified sob. Then my sister hugged me once more and the next thing I heard was her footsteps as she left me there. But before she reached the door, she stopped. “The girl—the one you… The one from the restaurant. She wasn’t what she seemed.”

  “Sha’maat, what have you done?”

  “I sent one of my agents to her parents. With money. To make sure the girl would stay quiet. They asked if he would also like a turn with her. They asked if it was his birthday too, and did he want to play the same game?”

  “I don’t understand—”

  “It was an act, Kellen. A piece of theatre, paid for by the marshals. All for your benefit. That girl beds men for money in a small room above the restaurant, and her ‘parents’ solicit customers for her.”

  I wanted to believe that. I wanted to believe it so badly I could almost forget every lie my sister had ever told me. Almost. “Shalla, if Father ordered you not to come, then why are you here?”

  It was pitch black in that cell, but when she spoke next I swear that I could see a yellow-haired girl of nine or ten, her eyes bright as she held her hand out to me. “Because you are my brother, Kellen, and because I love you.”

  53

  The Man in Grey

  “You hid,” Marshall Colfax said, pairing his words with a slap to my face that nearly took my jaw away with it. The rugged leather coat and broad-brimmed hat he wore were well matched to the hard grey walls of my cell. The two guards who’d accompanied him stood placidly a few feet away from us.

  “You hid,” he repeated, this time using the back of his hand. Something metal cut into my cheek on the return swing and I realised old Marshal Colfax must be married. Through the pain and nausea I wondered what kind of woman had chosen to wed a man like him. I imagined her pretty, though getting on in years. No doubt Colfax kept his work away from home. Probably liked to garden during the hot summer evenings, and listen to his wife read old Daroman romances after supper. For some strange reason, I wanted to know her name.

  “I—”

  He jammed his fist into my stomach. “You hid in your room as they took our queen.”

  Our queen. The irony of that “our” was clearly lost on him.

  The cell went blurry, just for a moment. Then my vision cleared and I focused on the things from my saddlebags, lying in a pile on the floor. Not much to show: two shirts, an extra pair of trousers, a few underclothes, a canteen, a couple of shiny items I suspect Reichis had stolen from the palace and not told me about, and the cards Sha’maat had brought back from my room. The one showing on top was the king of arrows. If Tasia was here right now, she’d tell me it represented a strong man with a soft heart. Not the way I’d describe Marshal Colfax.

  I wasn’t angry with him though. After what he and his slithering old snake, the white binder, had done to me, you’d think I’d be spitting in his face, telling him all the dark and dirty things I planned to do to him if ever I got the chance. You’d think I’d be telling him it was all his fault, that if he hadn’t done what he’d done to me I would’ve been able to protect the queen. But I didn’t. There wasn’t a trace of bile or resentment left in me.

  Colfax had more than enough for the two of us.

  In my relatively short life I’d seen men with murder in their eyes dozens of times. I’d seen bloodlust and I’d seen berserker rage. But I’d never seen any man as angry as Marshal Colfax.

  “I thought this was supposed to be an interrogation,” I said, trying to get the words out as I alternated between coughing and retching.

  He waited for me to stop vomiting before he put his hands around my neck and squeezed. “You let those men take our queen,” he said. His voice was a furious whisper, but his next words filled my ears and echoed through the emptiness inside me. “An eleven-year-old girl. And when they…” He looked as if he were choking on the words. “She was in her nightclothes. An eleven-year-old girl dragged away in her nightclothes.”

  For a moment it was as if he was trapped in that thought, paralysed by the pain it brought him. His grip on my neck slackened. His face looked older than it had before. After a minute though, his eyes cleared and stared into mine as his hand renewed its grip around my throat. “But you were safe, weren’t you? Hiding in the room she gave you. So tell me, what information could a lily-livered lying card player possibly offer?”

  I was already lightheaded from my coughing fit, so the lack of air made me black out for just a second. The marshal squeezed again and I thought I might die, which would have been blissful at that point, except that, being a coward, I feared death even more than life. In that brief moment I remembered what Sha’maat had said: You must outwit him, brother. You must outwit them all.

  “I can get her back,” I gasped when the marshal eased his grip.

  That earned me a laugh. I listened intently. Was it genuine? No, I hadn’t said anything all that funny. Was it the laugh that precedes a knife in the belly? Maybe. Probably. But there was something else there too. Confusion. Desperation. A shred of uncertainty that I needed to play as fast as I could, like a borrowed ace. “They didn’t take her far,” I said. “She’s still in the city.”

  Colfax grabbed the hair on top of my head and shook me. “How could you possibly know that, unless you were part of the conspiracy?”

  “If I was working with the kidnappers, do you think I would’ve stayed behind to get my arse handed to me by you?”

  The marshal reached behind his back and pulled something from his belt. An instant later, I felt the blade against my neck. “You might, if taking the queen was just the first part of the plan, or if you stayed back to prevent anyone from following.”

  Now it was my turn to laugh. The sound
was hoarse, and weak, and filled with the discordant melody of my own self-loathing in a way that made me hope the marshal wasn’t listening as closely as I had been. “Have I done anything so far to make you think I’d be brave enough to stay behind and sacrifice myself so that a couple of Daroman nobles could make their bid for power over the throne?”

  Colfax spat. “No, you’re too big a coward. On that score your credentials are well established, tutor of cards.” Then my words finally got through to him and he grabbed my jaw with his hand and yanked up. He was strong for an old man. “Wait. What do you mean, ‘Daroman nobles’? The men who took the queen were Zhuban assassins.”

  I tried shaking my head, but his grip was too strong, so instead I said, “The men who took her were dressed like Zhuban assassins, sure, but that was just a ruse so you’d use up all your men to close the roads out of the city. They’re working for a cabal of nobles right here in Darome.”

  “How could you possibly know that?”

  “Because they didn’t kill her on sight,” I said.

  The marshal tried his best to bore through my eyes with all the hatred and distrust he could muster. But behind it all I could tell he was hooked, if only a little bit, and had been asking himself the same questions.

  “Listen,” I said as steadily and earnestly as I could. “The Zhuban call themselves philosophers, but they’re no different from any religious zealots. Their whole country is mad with devotion for their eight-spoked wheel of fate. They’re obsessed with two things: destiny and purity. They won’t even touch anything they deem contrary to the natural order.” I took a breath. Now we’d see if he’d buy this or not. I had to lead him along, but I wouldn’t get him to buy the story if I fed it all to him myself. I needed him to write the last chapter. “Can you imagine,” I asked, “anything more contrary to their notion of the natural order than a heathen child queen who claims to embody a two-thousand-year-old spirit?”

  The marshal’s face was tight, his jaw clenching as he prepared to give me the knife. But then a light came on somewhere in that relentlessly dogged tracker’s brain of his. “They weren’t wearing gloves,” he said at last.