by T. O. Munro
Abroath screwed up his eyes to study the distant pedestrians and wished he had either the far sight of Tordil’s elven eyes, or command of one of Thom’s spells so that he could see whether any danger awaited them. Sir Ambrose had spared them no escort, insisting Kaylan’s journey was against the queen’s instructions, but the big knight had at least allowed Abroath to accompany his convalescing patient. The had passed in safety a few isolated riders and an occasional wagon, but the party ahead of them was more numerous than any they had seen before. A double line trudging resolutely on in the direction of Hatcham.
It was a trick of perspective that made them seem further away than they were, until Abroath suddenly realised the truth. “By the Goddess, they’re children. There must a score of them. Who would let children wander unaccompanied in this weather and at this time?”
It was a few yards more before Kaylan spoke up. “They’re not children,” the thief said as the walkers became aware of the horsemen in their rear.
The double line about faced and then fell out to the side of the road in a line of military exactness. Abroath caught the gleam of sunlight on sharpened steel and noted the stocky build of these well armed youngsters. “By all that’s holy,” he demanded. “Who’d give a child an axe?”
“They’re not children,” Kaylan told him again, though this time with a gurgling cough which Abroath took some time to realise was a laugh.
Kaylan’s eagerness to close the distance was still in thrall to the discomfort of his injuries, none of them softened by hours in the saddle. So Abroath had some leisure in which to examine the ersatz children. They were no taller than a ten year old, but a lot broader and the helms they wore added something to their stature and their menace. However, the least juvenile feature of their appearance were the bristling beards which sprouted in colourful profusion across the chainmail hauberks they wore. “Dwarves!” Abroath murmured.
The prior found he had instinctively let Kaylan take the lead. His experience of the dwarven folk was limited to the tales his father and brothers had told him. It was possible that they had embroidered their stories of a hardy people, driven by greed and quick to anger at any imagined slight, but Abroath was not about to take any chances with twenty axe wielding foot soldiers with only a half healed thief to aid him.
Kaylan had no such reserve. He let his mount take him a full horse length ahead of the prior, so he was the recipient of the dwarf leader’s peremptory greeting. “State your name and business, and be quick about it.”
Abroath shivered a little, but not from cold. The dwarf although a little taller than the others, still came not much higher than Kaylan’s stirrup. His flaxen beard was woven in three thick plaits, the outer two tucked into his belt, and the third descending almost to his knees. In his right hand he held a heavy throwing axe, twirling its haft about his fingers, with the same idle ease that a scribe might spin a pencil.
The thief slipped awkwardly from his saddle and bowed low before the blond dwarf leader. “I am Kaylan-ap-Stonehelm,” he introduced himself.
Abroath saw the flicker of surprise cross the dwarf’s brow before he returned the greeting in kind. “Pardig-ap-Lupus.” As he straightened Pardig gave the thief another shrewd look. “You’re awful tall for a dwarf, Master Kaylan-ap-Stonehelm.”
Kaylan gave a self-deprecating moue in apology for his deformity, before Pardig went on “I am not familiar with your clan name either. Where is it the Stonehelms hail from?”
The thief got no chance to answer for the two dwarves at the far end of the line suddenly broke ranks. They came running up as a pair, one dark, one blond, and clapped Kaylan firmly on the shoulder, or at least as close to that point as they could reach.
“I said it was our longshanks,” the dark one said.
“Did you ever find that girl you was looking for?” the other demanded.
The thief stumbled beneath their good natured greeting, but managed to perform another pair of wincing bows. “Mag-ap-Bruin, Glim-ap-Bruin,” he greeted the darker and the lighter dwarf in turn. “It has been too long, and much has happened since we last met.”
“Indeed it has, indeed it has, Longshanks,” the dwarves replied.
“Ye can vouch for this overgrown Dwarf?” Pardig’s query drew a bout of fierce nodding from the brothers ap-Bruin. “And his companion?”
Abroath suddenly felt all eyes on him. He dismounted quickly. To remain on horseback seemed likely to infuriate these creatures of lesser stature, or so his brothers’ tales would suggest.
“This is Prior Abroath,” Kaylan made the introduction. “He has been looking after my health of late.”
Abroath bowed as low as he dared while the darker haired Mag muttered, “well judging by your face young longshanks, he’s not been doing a very good job.”
Kaylan laughed painfully. “You should have seen it before the prior set his healing hands to work. Prior Abroath, may I present the brothers Mag-ap-Bruin and Glim-ap-Bruin. I was for a time the guest of their brother Bar-ap-Bruin. Like you they have had occasion to nurse me back to health.”
“Aye, has that lady of yours been leading you into more foolhardy orc-bothering?” Glim asked.
“Reunions, for all the joy they may bring, are not our chief business here today.” Pardig tried to assert his authority.
“Nor ours,” Abroath concurred.
“We are on our way to the court of Prince Rugan,” the Dwarven leader announced. “Delegates from the ten clans of the Hadrans.”
“We are bound there ourselves,” Arbroath said. “Though I hear the half-elf’s court is a place of uncertain welcomes.”
“Welcome or not, master Prior, we have news for the great lords and ladies that meet there. News the High Council agreed we should share.” Pardig replied. “Things have been changing in the fallen province of Undersalve.”
***
“Seneschal! Seneschal Kimbolt!”
Kimbolt did not register his new title at first and it was not until the queen added his name that the former captain stopped and turned to face her.
She must have hurried down the steps from Rugan’s new raised council chamber for her cheeks were flushed. The other council members dispersed around them, seeking the warmth and comfort of the main palace. Kimbolt waited for the queen’s command and, when she gave none, but merely stared at him he dipped his chin in enquiry. “Your Majesty?”
“Come Kimbolt, Seneschal Kimbolt, walk a while with me in the gardens.”
The tips of his ears were burning and his voice cracked a little as he responded, “yes, your Majesty.”
They walked in silence for some minutes, threading their way through the ornate porticos which separated the different sections of Rugan’s elaborate winter gardens. The queen gave a shiver at his side and Kimbolt cursed his negligent discourtesy. The day was cold and she was clad only in another borrowed gown and a thin shawl. He plucked his cloak from about his shoulders and pressed it on her. “Here, your Majesty,” he insisted.
“Why did you go?” She demanded even as she pulled the thick material close around her neck.
“Your Majesty?”
“I woke up alone. You had gone. Why?”
“It seemed better, safer, your Majesty.”
“I told you, my name is Niarmit.”
“Last night you were Niarmit and I was Kimbolt; today you are the queen and I am a mere captain in your service.”
“You’re my seneschal, Kimbolt. Not a mere captain.”
He broke his stride, suddenly uncertain of her meaning or intention. “I am a commoner by birth and, as Rugan has noted so well, a traitor by behaviour. I do not think the council would approve if they had guessed at how we…”
“Fuck the council,” she said with such sudden heat that he stopped in astonishment. She had gone a stride and a half on before she realised, and then she turned to face him. Her eyes were hooded with doubt as she scanned his face with a fierce intensity. With some effort he kept his expression impassiv
e.
There was a bench seat beneath a leafless arbour to their left. She waved him towards it and then sat beside him. He thought she had been about to speak two or three times before she actually began. “I want you to know something, somethings.”
“Your Majesty.” He was all obedient attentiveness.
“When I was seventeen I was betrothed, his name was Davyn. We were young, we were going to be married.” She gazed out over the snow clad gardens, seeing something else. “He was so eager that it seemed unnecessary for us to wait, to wait for the formality of a ceremony to bless...” She hesitated a moment, then holding his gaze with her eyes, she said with heavy emphasis, “to wait to bless our union.” She gulped a deep breath down. “But then came Bledrag field and all things changed and we were never married.”
Kimbolt searched his mind for the appropriate absolution one might offer for such a private confession. He had begun to build a response around the phrase ‘no shame’ but as he opened his mouth to speak she commanded his silence with a shake of her head.
“There was another, in the long years when we fought the invaders from hiding. It was a difficult time, it was a mistake.” She rubbed the fingers of her right hand absently along the line of her jaw. “A bad mistake. Kaylan would have killed him if the orcs hadn’t first.”
“Kaylan is very protective of you, your Majesty.” Kimbolt’s voice was thick, a tumult of ungoverned emotions seethed within him.
She took his hand, placed it between her own. “And then there was you, Kimbolt.”
“Your Majesty.” He replied, unable to identify any other response.
In a long uncomfortable silence, the only thing that grew was a sense that he was disappointing her.
“I just wanted you to know,” she said with a flick of her head. “To know that…” she stopped. Further words eluded her.
“Yes, your Majesty.”
“Can you stop calling me that.”
“Yes, your…. yes Niarmit.”
“That’s better.” She scanned the bare branches of the trees and bushes. “It’s strange you know, how you can spend your days surrounded by people and yet feel so alone.”
He put his other hand with hers. “Whatever companionship you want of me, I will gladly give it.”
“I wanted you to stay with me until I woke up.”
He swallowed the rebuke with a slow nod of apology. “I’m sorry.”
She shrugged off his regret and at the other end of a long drawn silence he asked, “and what do you want now? Niarmit?”
The use of her name brought a smile to her lips. “You’re learning, Kimbolt and I’m sorry, I’m doing this all wrong. Everything is in the wrong order. We know each other so well and yet not at all.” She let go his hand and pressed her own hands against her mouth exhaling a misty cloud of breath before admitting, “I don’t know what I want.”
He waited.
“But I didn’t want there to be a silence between us. I didn’t want to pretend nothing at all had changed, even if I don’t really know how it has changed. I don’t want it to be difficult.”
He took her hand and raised it to his lips for the lightest of kisses. Her cheeks coloured at his touch while he assured her, “Niarmit you are my queen and I am Kimbolt, I am your captain, your seneschal, I am anything you want me to be.”
She looked back at him, a green eyed gaze of unsettling steadiness. “But what do you want to be, Kimbolt? What do you want us to be?”
There was a cough behind him, from someone just out of sight beyond the corner of a high hedge. Kimbolt quickly got to his feet and let go the queen’s hand. A second or two later, Lady Giseanne slipped into view, her expression quite inscrutable.
“I am sorry for intruding your Majesty,” she said. “But Mistress Elise has been to see me.”
“Hepdida?”
Giseanne smiled away the queen’s alarm. “The princess is well, but moreover Elise thinks she is well enough to be told the news. I agree with Elise that she will not thank us for any further delay.”
Niarmit sighed. “I wish there was an end to the bad news I must give her.”
“I can do it, if you wish.” Giseanne touched the great sapphire ring she wore. “I felt his passing too.”
“Together. We tell her together. We are her only family now.”
***
The air was stale in the great subterranean chamber that was Maelgrum’s audience hall. Magical light of unparalleled power still failed to penetrate into the dark recesses of its vaulted ceiling or the dim alcoves and passageways to left and right. The fetid atmosphere was rich with the scent of fear and despair sweated out by the living, and the soon to be not living, visitors to the undead lord in the weeks since his return to his old abode.
When Quintala had first ventured into the huge space seventeen and a half years earlier, there had been a dusty dread to the place, a malevolent shadow that had been superimposed on the darkness. Now, though, the evil was alive, a tangible sense of something worse than hatred. This was a place which did not loath the living, it was simply indifferent to them. No life was of any value, save the service it could offer when bent to the Dark Lord’s will.
In truth, there were a few individuals who, in foiling Maelgrum’s ambitions, might have incited in him a thirst for the cruellest vengeance his mind could devise. But for the vast majority, be they orc or human, warrior or wizard, the lich’s interest went no further than the advantage they could offer him in life, or the amusement they might provide in the drawn out suffering of their deaths.
For seventeen years she had been through the dizzying daily ritual of communicating with her distant master. The groping fingers of Maelgrum’s consciousness had intruded on her mind, while in turn her own awareness had leached into the dark bubbling cavern of Maelgrum’s malice. Treachery had been exhausting, his direction demanding and autocratic. In turn her attempts to steer her straying into her master’s conscience had been clumsily unyielding. Between the deep vertiginous ravines of his unthinking cruelty, were filaments of memory she longed to pursue, to probe into his history and answer questions about her own past and her future. But in seventeen years she had discovered nothing of consequence.
If Maelgrum had been aware of her determination to pry he had never let it show. In truth she suspected it would merely have amused him, shutting off another opening in the voluminous folds of his awareness, letting her glimpse an irrelevant excursion into thoughts of some parallel plane of existence long since turned to dust. She had been the mouse and he the cat in an incidental chase around the corners of his mind, an inconsequential side show to the main business of betraying the entire Kingdom of the Salved.
But now the need for magical communication, brokered by the black medallions of treachery, was at an end. She stood alone before the throne of Maelgrum and the flames in the Dark Lord’s eye sockets glimmered faintly, his skeletal head tilted to one side in anticipation of her question.
“So,” she said. “Tell me again about my mother?”
His head rocked back, toothy mouth gaping in a black grin. “Alwaysss the sssame quessstion, Sssenesschal!”
“I think you may call me Quintala. My title I abandoned in my brother’s palace.”
The eye pits pulsated with the gentlest flicker of undead annoyance. “And you may call me Massster!”
She raised an eyebrow at that. “Am I really to rank on a level with that idiot Rondol and the crone Marwella?”
“Both have been my loyal ssservantsss, enduring hardssship in the domain beyond the barrier, while you have been living a life of sssome comfort and luxury.” Maelgrum’s tone was still amused as though debating some academic detail in an irrelevant episode of history.
“You forget. Without me, Bulveld would be hale and hearty and still on the throne. Xander would have taken himself off as mercenary to the Eastern Lands and probably died in some inconsequential skirmish or maybe a whorehouse. Haselrig would be in harmless thrall to his books and,�
�� she paused breathing back the anger. “And your soul would still be imprisoned in a gem in this very chamber. I think my service outranks all others.”
“Hassselrig thinksss that it wasss he who wasss the heart and sssoul of your conssspiracy.”
“Only because I let him think that.”
Maelgrum nodded “I find it ssstrange that you would go to sssuch lengthsss asss you have to protect the little librarian from the red wizard’sss anger. Hasselrig wasss your dupe. What further purpossse can he sssserve?”
Quintala shrugged. “Maybe I have a weakness, maybe I just want to annoy that bearded imbecile whom you rate so highly. But you still haven’t answered my question.”
The lich stirred in his throne, shifting his rotted frame sideways in a gesture of relaxation. His fingers ran lightly over the space where his lips would have been. “Tell me about your brother, Quintala.”
“What of him?”
“He interessstsss me. I am intrigued by hisss patiencsse. Hisss actionsss are not hasssty.”
“He’s a coward.”
There was a deeper red flare of irritation in the hollow eye sockets of Maelgrum’s skull. “Your hatred for him isss a weaknessss, Quintala, a greater failing than your fondnessss for your pet librarian.”
“I learned my hatred from you.”
“You were full enough of hatred before I ever met you,” Maelgrum observed. “But where I have hated it wasss alwaysss with purpossse. I have unleassshed my hate where it could bessst sssserve my ambition. Your hate isss asss much a flaw asss that meaninglessss emotion called love. It can missslead and enssslave you. Your brother’sss patiencssee…”
“My brother should be dead. I was a split second from destroying him, before the witch arrived.”
A thin veil of mist trailed from Maelgrum’s wrists as his eyes flared with a deeper anger at the interruption. “You did not ssshare that part of your plan with me.”
“There wasn’t always time to tell you everything,” she said coldly. “You didn’t tell me the witch had survived her fall from the sky.”