by Gwynn White
“Mate, I’ve got to go. You drink this for me.” She shoved her cup into his hands and skittered away.
The commentator was yelling over the PA system, spouting combat-ese at a hundred words per minute: “S’ Guy takes it on the forte and returns the backhand, S’ Brant looking good on the floor …”
She reached the end of the row of concession stands and doubled back behind them. If anyone had been following Floyd closely, it was no one she knew by sight. But she could’ve been seen from up in the stands. Ed would have no problem grassing on her. She dared not stall another minute. She twitched her scarf aside from her collar mic. “Backdraught,” she murmured, head down, barely moving her lips. “I have a possible suspect. Ex-Company body, personally known to me. His name is Floyd Ayrett. Early thirties, dark, checked coat, jeans, no hat. I’m on the ground, static behind the concession stands. Advise.”
Floyd, Floyd, I’m sorry.
“Zero. Backdraught, this person is known to you?” That was Alf on the ops desk.
Click-click, she double-pressed to confirm. Sorry, Floyd, sorry, but what else can I do? The way he’d been talking, it sounded like he had been back north, where he came from. Probably mingling with his own people. He’d have been telling them his tale of woe. And possibly … just possibly … getting offered a new job …
You could hide a gun under a coat like that.
Alf told her to hold the trigger, told Ed and Stray to get down there and back her, told them that he was alerting the stadium’s security guards.
With a screen of people in front of her, she watched Floyd drain his first cup of lager, looking like a comedy drunk on telly with one cup in each hand. He emptied his second cup of lager, cast it down, and lurched off. “Suspect is walkabout,” Leonie muttered. “Intending the north exit.” Why couldn’t he have picked the south exit, where the security guards were? “Backdraught is following, sighted.”
Alf’s response was lost in a roar that engulfed the stadium. People around Leonie screamed, too, even though they couldn’t see what had happened. “Disarmed!” the PA system parped. “S’ Brant’s disarmed, and S’ Guy… steps back and waits for him to pick his sword up! What a stunning display of chivalry from Sir Guy! Three atteints for that in a tourney bout, but this isn’t tourney, Sir Guy!”
Floyd vanished into the exit. Leonie moved faster. A wedge of spectators charged out of the tunnel, caught up in the excitement and rushing to get closer to the action. She elbowed through them to the corridor that ran all the way around the stadium. “Backdraught. I’m unsighted!” she hissed. Which way had Floyd gone? Overflowing garbage cans offered no hiding places. Maybe he’d just needed the loo. She barged into the men’s toilets, drawing cries of outrage and a couple of obscene invitations from punters who shook their dripping junk at her.
“Zero,” Alf came back on the net. “Security has the exits covered. He can’t get out of the stadium. Hunter, do a walkaround on the ground floor. Killer, second tier walkway. Backdraught, get up those stairs.”
Leonie climbed. Ben Corr was high. The tree line petered out in stunted pines and you had to struggle on up slopes of shale, clambering over outcroppings worn by the wind to the shapes of viscera, as if the mountain’s petrified guts were bulging out of ancient wounds. Her toes felt like sponges drenched in acid. She burst out into the sunlight on the third and highest tier, and Floyd was nowhere. The walkway was jam-packed, everyone out of their seats and craning to get that bit nearer the fight.
“And Sir Guy is retreating. His footwork still looks good, but he’s favoring his left leg …” Sounded like first blood to Sir Brant. Must’ve happened while Leonie was on the stairs. Still, the two knights must be evenly matched, for the fight to last this long. The punters were getting their money’s worth.
Leonie spun in a slow circle. She saw Princess Madelaine leaning over the front of the royal box. There was another box on the opposite side of the stadium, draped with bright green banners. Faces clustered in it, mouths open wide and black in inaudible shouts. Nearer, Leonie saw a little girl with her whole face painted crimson, black lions on her cheeks, her expression oddly tranquil. To little kids today, what with the television and all, this kind of thing must be a right bore … It’s a sacrifice, Floyd had said. She hoped he got away and found somewhere nice and quiet to drink himself to death.
People were turning around, looking behind her. Leonie tracked their pointing fingers, and there was Floyd on top of the stadium wall, wobbling like a tightrope walker. Sponsored Emigration! said the billboard behind him. Only £500 Buys You a New Life! Swear On with the Khmeria Corporation!
And Floyd stretched out his arms, coat flapping like wings as he swayed like a bird about to take off into the wintry blue sky.
“O-o-ooh!”
Floyd grabbed the bottom corner of the billboard.
“He’s going to fall!”
“How the hell’d he get up there?”
“He must’ve climbed,” Leonie said. “You could do it if you stood on the backs of the top seats, look.”
A couple of yards away from the billboard, a crow perched on the wall. A crow? Too big. A raven. As black as the devil’s underpants.
Leonie thumbed the pressel. “Backdraught. I’ve got him. He’s up on top of the wall. Security needs to get up here. I’m going to try to get him down.”
“Fuck me,” she heard Ed say without identifying himself.
“Zero. Backdraught, does he have a weapon?”
“Not sure. Not that I can see.”
“Be careful. If …” But she didn’t hear what Alf was worried about because another roar rocked the stadium, and Leonie was already on the move anyway, shoving up the last flight of stairs. She climbed over the seats and the people in them to get directly under Floyd. Her fingertips fell a yard short of his feet.
“Floyd! Floyd! Come down from there, you silly fucker!”
He had almost reached the end of the billboard. He glanced down but did not seem to see her. Alf came back in her ear: “… shoot him. Do you understand? If he presents a threat, you are cleared to shoot him.”
Leonie almost laughed. She understood, all right. They were afraid Floyd had gotten himself up high to either snipe at the VIPs, or ‘appeal to the saints’—an old English tradition. When you just couldn’t take it anymore, you made a list of your grievances, found someplace high like the roof of a saint’s shrine in a village square, and started denouncing the fuckers who were getting you down. But she didn’t think Floyd had anything like that in mind. He took a faltering step beyond the safety of the billboard, and everyone around Leonie groaned.
“Come down,” she begged. “Come down, let’s talk!”
“Out of the way, love.” A burly man shoved her aside and bent his knee to make a step. His mate hopped up, grabbed the struts of the billboard, and swung up onto the wall, just as Floyd himself must have done. “Come on, cully, grab hold!” He stretched, but without leaving the support of the billboard, he couldn’t quite reach the back of Floyd’s coat.
With a terrified jerk, Floyd took another step, and another. His mouth moved as if he was talking to the bird that perched ahead of him. Appealing to it.
“—takes the point in his shoulder, uses his own flesh as a shield, and the riposte strikes hoooome! A clean thrust to the heart!”
The bird bounced into the air. Leonie felt the downdraught and smelled the mossy, peaty reek of bogwater. The bird flew straight at Floyd, beak gaping.
He opened his arms to meet it, pirouetted on one foot, and swan-dived off the wall. The wrong, long way down.
Leonie groaned. “He’s jumped,” she shouted over the noise of the crowd. “Backdraught. Suspect has jumped. Check the parking lot.”
The bird winged off into the sky.
“… mortal blow! And it’s over, over! The victory goes to Sir Brant Yates-Briggs, champion of House Wessex!”
19
Oswald
Thirty Seconds Later
Oswald hurtled down the stairs to the armory.
“Make sure the media can’t get in here,” he barked.
Guy lay on his back on the only clear bit of floor in the armory, miraculous relics positioned at the five points of his body, with an extra two under his elbows. The outcome of the fight hadn’t surprised Oswald. Both combatants were world-class swordsmen, both had a personal stake in the fight, but Brant also had the adamantine endurance of the career soldier. He had worn Guy down, sapping the younger man’s energy by keeping his distance, and ended it with the simplest of all strokes, the sacrificial lunge, taking Guy’s blade in his left shoulder and trapping it with his flesh for the instant he needed to run his own point into Guy’s chest. You would never use that technique in tourney, since wounds counted as atteints against you. Guy’s very mastery had let him down.
“Put the relics closer to him!”
The hospitallers scuffled around Guy, arranging his limp arms over the heads of long-dead royalty brought from the Tower of London and the feretory caskets of nameless saints belonging to the stadium. A pair of plastinated hands with inset gold fingernails were laid on Guy’s chest. His tunic spread on either side of his body like broken wings, sopped in a dark pool. The wound in his chest looked too small to have spilled so much blood.
“Why are you doing this?”
Oswald turned his gaze. Colin Argent, that great friend of Guy’s. “He may be saved,” he said briefly.
“He’s dead. Oh, Guy!”
“You give up too easily. I’ve seen men and women saved with their stomachs ripped open by grenade shrapnel. I’ve seen a man live with his entire face blown off—he wished he hadn’t. That’s a clean wound. He has a chance.”
“Through the heart!”
“Death isn’t necessarily immediate.” Oswald looked at his watch: four minutes, the second hand sweeping relentlessly around.
“Oh my God!” Madelaine pushed past him in a swirl of sable-trimmed black. She fell to her knees by Guy’s side. “You stupid bloody man,” she railed. Oswald debated hauling her back, but decided against it—it would do no good for them to be seen quarrelling in public. “You daren’t die,” she whimpered. “Not you, too! I can’t lose everyone …”
“Why?” Colin said to Oswald. “Why do you want to save him?”
“For her,” Oswald admitted. “And for Piers, of course. All I can do for him now is save his brother. Well, try.”
“You’re dishonoring his sacrifice.” Colin plunged forward and stooped to lift Guy’s hands off the relics.
Madelaine screamed. Oswald seized Colin, dragged him away from Guy, and slammed him against a support pillar. “You and your House have already dragged the Sauvages to the brink of the abyss. Now you’d make Guy a martyr to your stupid, hopeless cause. Cretin.”
Madelaine wept quietly.
“I had to make it look good,” Brant Yates-Briggs said, limping in on the arm of his squire. He had a relic bound to his shoulder with gauze, the dressing discolored with drying blood. “The stands were crying for me to take his head.”
“Why didn’t you?” Colin sniffled.
Yates-Briggs yawned enormously. “It would have been too merciful. Think: if he lives, how bitter life will be to him, knowing that his defeat sealed his brother’s fate! My triumph will be multiplied by the number of his days.” He slid out of his squire’s grasp and sat down on the floor. “Guilty, guilty: I’ve proved it on my honor.” He yawned again.
Oswald looked at his watch again. Six and a half minutes. It was probably hopeless. “I have to go. Darling, I’ll have the helicopter sent back for you.” No use asking Madelaine to leave Guy now.
The chief hospitaller bayed, “He breathes! A miracle, thanks be to the saints! He breathes!”
Oswald shoved the cleric out of the way and picked up Guy’s limp wrist. Holding his breath, he felt a thready, irregular pulse. “He’s not out of danger yet. I would ask you not to move him until he regains consciousness,” he addressed Colin and the other Sauvage hangers-on. Wasting his breath, of course; they’d bundle Guy into a helicopter and decamp as soon as Oswald turned his back.
On his way out, Oswald met a lady-in-waiting hurrying along the passage with Michael at her side. He paused to drop a kiss on his son’s forehead. “Make sure our relics get back safely to the Tower,” he told the lady-in-waiting. “That lot in there are quite capable of walking off with them.”
Given another month, even another fortnight, Oswald thought he would have been able to save Piers Sauvage, too. But the indecently short lead-up to the trial had outpaced even his planning skills.
He’d pushed the preparations for Operation PREDATOR as far as he dared, even to stockpiling ammunition and fuel at NatChiv. He could go no further without the king’s explicit permission. The alternative was to wait until the ROCK’s A and C Troops rotated back into the country. That would give Oswald a full complement of six hundred knights, if he delayed by a few days—perfectly doable—the scheduled departure of B Troop for Khmeria. But A and C Troops were not due back until the middle of December.
And so it had come to this.
One Sauvage brother half-dead, the other condemned to death, and the king seemingly determined to seal his own House’s fate.
Oswald hurried straight from his helicopter to the parade ground in the Tower of London, where the lords of the Cabinet were already assembled. In front of the Waterloo Block, the Household troop of the Lions stood in buffed and polished ranks. Their sparkling turnout belied a chronic lack of discipline. In the silence, they shuffled, coughed, and occasionally dropped a rifle.
In the middle of the drill square, at the bottom of the flagpole, on a specially erected platform, stood Piers Sauvage.
Anger simmered in Oswald’s mind, inflamed by the presence of his enemies, chief among them old Stuart in his brass and braid and epaulettes, every inch the rock-chewing general at eighty.
Slightly apart lounged the Household, Tristan’s mob of tourney champions and secretaries without portfolio, looking bored as they all waited for the king to arrive.
The sun had gone in, leaving a biting chill in the wind. The Wessex flag flapped lazily. The king was late. Piers must have been in mental agony, wondering if even now Tristan was in changing his mind. As Oswald watched, Piers sat down on the steps of the block.
Oswald thought: Fuck it. He broke ranks with the other noblemen and went to give Piers a cigarette.
“I think I’ve saved Guy,” he muttered. “He was breathing when I left. He’s in Madelaine’s care.”
Piers seemed to sag with relief and sit up straighter all at once. His smile spread to his eyes. “By God, Oswald. We could have saved this country between us.”
Oswald nodded, withdrawing. And now I’ll just have to do it without you.
It was even odds whether Piers would have supported PREDATOR, anyway. With the wealth of House Sauvage at his back, he’d never had as much motivation as the knights of the ROCK, most of whom came from less-well-off families.
Oswald returned to his place in the ranks as a sergeant-major bawled: “His sovereign Ma-a-a-ajesty, King Tristan the Second of Great Britain!”
Tantara-tan-tan! from the waiting trumpets. Everyone stood up. Tristan walked onto the parade ground, unaccompanied, wearing jeans and an old mantle. He cast a cold eye over the assembly. Even Oswald caught himself holding his breath.
The sergeant-major, splendidly immune to nerves, stamped and bawled: “Parade … shun! Slope arms!” They stood like rocks, trembling and red-faced. “Present arms! Salute!”
Tristan returned the salute carelessly. His gaze raked the assembled nobles and paused on the technicians standing to attention in front of the mobile plastination system, a van containing dissection equipment and an acetone tank where Piers’s relics would be preserved for return to his family.
“To hell with this,” the king said audibly. He crooked a gloved finger. Piers stumbled over to him, shackles clanking, shivering in th
e wind. “See here, nephew. We can all stand here and listen to the priest wittering on for half an hour, then I think there’s some music scheduled, and they tell me you’ve prepared some poignant last words—the mystery of divine justice, not half. Well, we can do it that way. Or you can have death at mine own hand, now, minus the ceremonial bullshit. Your choice.”
Piers said clearly: “If it must be done, let it be by thine own hand, my king.”
He dropped to one knee, bowed his head in a graceful obeisance, and crouched with his hands on the ground, braced.
Oswald felt nauseated. They train them to it from childhood, he thought. He never had a chance.
Tristan drew the longsword which had been concealed by his cloak, took a single practice swing, and then swung the sword again.
Piers’s body knelt, gouting blood from between its shoulders, and toppled sideways. His head rolled. The MPS crew scrambled to retrieve it. Tristan stopped them, bloodied blade in hand. He picked up the head by the hairknot. “This is mine. Vivienne can have his other relics.”
He took a black cloth bag from inside his mantle, dropped the head in, and turned to leave. The whole thing had taken less than two minutes.
At the back of the crowd a woman wept.
Lord Norfolk, Minister of the Interior, said distinctly: “Not quite the thing.”
Earl Stuart said: “Superb swing, though. One clean cut, no faffing about—takes me back.”
Oswald heard a shutter click. Someone in the Household was surreptitiously photographing the corpse. By nightfall, that person would be a lot richer, and the pictures would be all over the tabloids. How would the commoners react? Oswald had been born a commoner and so he thought he knew. They weren’t stupid. They would see that the king had cut the head off a man who’d committed no crime except being his likeliest replacement.