by T. O. Munro
“I didn’t know.” He admitted his ignorance softly. “I have not ssspiesss in every camp, Quintala.”
Quintala seethed at the recollection of a vengeance foiled. “How did she escape? Haselrig told me she was chained to a stone block in a sealed cavern with a dragon for company.”
“It wasss unexsspected,” Maelgrum conceded.
Quintala scowled in dissatisfaction. “I delivered her to you, exactly as you wished. I managed and manipulated her movements as well as any sheepdog ever corralled a lamb. She never knew how far she’d been my puppet, until you let her slip through your blackened fingers and escape to despoil the moment I finally struck back. Your failure cost me dear.”
“Take care, Quintala,” Maelgrum admonished, bright eyed and enveloped in a mist of anger. “Lessst your intemperate ssstyle of addresss ssshould draw sssome painful sssanction from me. There are few who have sssspoken thusss to me and sssurvived, certainly none who have done ssso before witnessesss. My patiencsse, like your brother’sss isss great but not infinite.”
Quintala shivered. She told herself it was the wave of cold which had rolled out from the lich’s frozen corpse. For all the fire that raged within her, she had to remind herself that she was still the mouse and Maelgrum the cat. Her survival depended on how far she inspired his amusement and curiosity, more than his anger. Her lips worked in silence for a moment and then she gave a short bow of her head.
The Dark Lord’s bony jaw dipped in the slightest nod of acknowledgement at her submission. “The lassst to challenge me in thisss hall, wasss the one who asssisssted the witch in her essscape. He knew hisss actionsss had sssealed his fate and chossse to vent hiss ssspleeen while he died.” Maelgrum paused, head titled as he scanned his memory. “Or wasss it I who vented hisss ssspleen.”
The lich’s mouth widened in a grin as he waited for Quintala to share his amusement. She let her own lips shape a wry smile as she retorted, “I daresay you vented his liver as well!”
Maelgrum clapped his hands together in pleasure at a riposte in keeping with his own twisted humour. “Indeed I did, Quintala, indeed I did.”
***
“Did he suffer?” Hepdida asked.
Niarmit and Giseanne exchanged glances at the question. The queen’s hand went instinctively to the royal ankh around her neck. At the heart of the jewel was the pale pink gem which had flared into a blazing heat against her chest at the moment of the death of her Uncle and heir, Bishop Udecht.
Rugan’s wife massaged the great sapphire ring on her hand, through which she had been privy to her distant brother’s state of mind and through which she also had learned of his remote death, just as she had learned of the passing of her other brothers, Xander and Gregor.
They both knew and had always known, that Udecht’s end had not been easy and they both hesitated to share that fact with his daughter.
The princess looked from her aunt to her cousin and back again. Niarmit shrugged off the question. “He’s with the Goddess now, past all pain and distress.”
“You believe that? You believe there is a Goddess?” Hepdida ran a hand through her hair, teasing out the central white strands. The pale lock and a few tiny pockmarks on her skin were the only legacy of the disease with which Quintala had cursed her, the disease which had tied Niarmit to her cousin’s bedside.
The two pairs of straight parallel scars on the girl’s cheeks, however, were an older injury left by the orc Grundurg from whom Niarmit had rescued her. Niarmit remembered similar marks she had seen on the bishop’s face, broader stripes made by fingers not a blade, inflicting frostbite not a cut, but still a deliberate imitation of the wounds on Hepdida’s face. She shivered at the thought of he whose touch could have caused such injury to the father, and at the traitor who would have told the Dark Lord exactly what scars the daughter bore.
“Your father believed in the Goddess,” she told her cousin. “He trusted her and used her grace to heal me.” She flexed her fingers, clenching and unclenching them while marvelling at the power of the Goddess’s grace that Udecht had released. A power in an instant to restore to full use, two sacks of bone that had been crushed between stone and an orcish mace.
“He trusted her? And now he’s dead. Doesn’t sound like much of a Goddess to me.”
“She is overwrought, your Majesty,” Giseanne quickly interjected keen to deflect any accusation of blasphemy. “She knows not what she’s saying.”
“I think she knows exactly what she’s saying, your Highness,” Mistress Elise dourly observed from the doorway where she stood supervising the visitors’ audience with her patient. “The princess and I have both experienced enough suffering in our lives to be entitled to ask some questions of the Goddess.”
“Please, Mistress Elise,” Giseanne implored. “These are times of doubt and suspicion. Let us not add to that with any unwise words which might be overheard.”
Elise gave a snort of displeasure. “And there was I thinking we were all friends now, all past sins forgiven. Let me guess, your husband the prince still wants me imprisoned and exiled for the crime of human sorcery?”
Giesanne shook her head a little too quickly. “He understands how much he has to be thankful to you for, Mistress Elise, whatever he may have said in the past. However, I would rather we did not jeapordise that accord with any ill-judged aspersions on the deity.”
Elise was about to reply, pure white hair shaking as, beneath the multitude of pockmarks her face twisted into an expression of anger. But Niarmit waved her fury down with a splayed hand.
“I have had my moments of doubt too, Lady Giseanne. I, a priestess of the Goddess no less, cast my symbol of faith aside into the mountains.” She ran a finger along the intricate filigree of the wrought gold crescent about her neck. “The Goddess saw fit to restore both it and my faith to me.” She let her hand rest on the young princess’s shoulder. Hepdida flinched at the first touch but then relaxed beneath the soothing stroke of the queen’s hand. “I can take comfort in the certainty that your father is in her safe hands now, all the more blessed for the suffering and sacrifice he endured.”
“I don’t know what I’m supposed to feel, Niarmit,” Hepdida said in glum confusion. “I lived in his household all my life, first in Morwencairn and then in Sturmcairn. But I never knew he was my father until that night by the river. Am I supposed to cry for him? Vlad was the only father I’d known, a drunkard and dishonourably discharged soldier pretending to be some retired veteran while my mother waited in castles and temples.
“I keep thinking back on things the bishop said and did. But there was never any sign, not ever. No indication that I was anything other than a servant’s daughter. If he wouldn’t recognise me when he was alive, should I mourn for him now he’s dead?”
“He was a bishop and a prince,” Giseanne spoke up for her dead brother. “He’d made vows. It would have been complicated for him.”
The girl frowned at her aunt’s equivocation and turned to Niarmit. “Do your mourn for Gregor?” She asked. “After all you were his bastard just as much as I was Udecht’s?”
Niarmit foundered in her bid to respond. Gregor on his death had passed, not beyond the realm of mortal men, but into the hidden plane the Domain of the Helm, wrought by Eadran the Vanquisher. Unlike his brother Udecht, he rested not with the Goddess but in a sealed pocket of existence where all creation was shaped by the imaginings of its inhabitants, the king’s own dead predecessors.
The only means of entry was by wearing the Great Helm of the Vanquisher, a journey Niarmit had made three times. On each occasion she had been lucky to escape, twice thankful for her dead father’s intervention. For he shared the hellish world with the maddest of their forbears, the insane King Chirad the Third, the Kinslayer.
There was no simple answer to whether she mourned Gregor or not, and even a complicated answer was impossible to give. The protective dweomer of the Great Helm prevented anyone who wore it from speaking of its true nature. Any attempt
she made had always ended in tongue tied confusion.
Giseanne, moved either by the affront to the queen’s dignity or to her brother’s memory felt obliged to comment. “Hepdida,” she said with uncharacteristic severity. “You may have suffered much, but you are only fifteen and should speak with more courtesy to and of your elders.”
Hepdida gave her a bleak look. “Suffered much?” she played with the phrase. “Well, my lady, sitting where I am I’d say my elders had pretty much fucked it up.”
Two spots of colour flared on Giseanne’s cheeks, while Niarmit struggled free of the cloying contemplations of the Helm. The thought of Gregor had roused a half-remembered image from the brief moment of her last wearing of the Helm. She had put it on for just a second, using its magical protection to turn herself into a shield for Giseanne against the vengeful Quintala’s lightning spell. But in that split second before she had wrenched it from her head, she had glimpsed into the Domain of the Helm and the recollection of what she had seen made her shudder.
“Enough, Hepdida,” Niarmit snapped. “You are not a back corridor servant girl anymore. You are a princess, the crown princess, you are my heir now that your uncle is gone. You should bear both your grief and your joy with more dignity and less rudeness.”
The crown princess scowled petulantly. They had argued before over Hepdida’s changed status and the expectations laid on her, but this time at least the princess chose not to argue back. Niarmit used that moment of calm to turn to Elise. “Tell me, Mistress Elise.” Her manner was brisk and business like. “How is your patient? Well enough to do some royal service?”
Elise screwed up her scarred face. “The curse is gone, quite gone. All that remains is the weakness and wasting of days spent inactive abed and not eating. Another day or two of rest and good eating should see her as fit as she has ever been.”
“But she can stand, and walk now?”
“I can talk too,” Hepdida interrupted crossly. “And hear, all by myself. I don’t need Elise to translate for me.”
“Good,” Niarmit said. “There is a task I need done, which only you can do. Elise, get the princess dressed and bring her to our new council chamber.” She turned to Giseanne. “My lady, please summon Seneschal Kimbolt, and have him bring some rope, strong rope.”
***
Haselrig pushed back the lid of the chest and let it crash against the back panel with a bang. They lay inside, just where the bishop had left them. Twin swords, the finest blades in the whole Petred Isle and none left who could touch them, let alone wield them in any safety. Through a thousand years they had been carried by the Vanquisher and his heirs, The Father and The Son handed always from father to son. Traditionally the monarch had borne The Father while the crown prince had carried The Son, but the two swords were so nearly identical that it would take an expert to tell for certain which was Father and which was Son.
The unlamented traitor Prince Xander had claimed both weapons for himself. He had chipped The Son from Crown Prince Thren’s hand, breaking the blade free of the prince’s stony fingers before casting Thren’s petrified form from Sturmcairn’s highest tower into shattering oblivion on the rocks below. The Father he had claimed from his brother, King Gregor’s remains at the battle of Proginnot.
Haselrig reached into the chest stretching his fingers towards the hilt of the nearest weapon, teasing himself with a masochistic temptation. Eadran’s great bloodline enchantment protected his creations and their users from any who were not of his unbroken line. Haselrig had watched Xander tempt an unwise outlander into laying hands on the hilt of The Son. The magical discharge had blasted the unfortunate dupe into some minutes of insensibility. Haselrig flexed his fingers wondering whether he dared attempt the experiment. At least the swords lacked the power of Eadran’s final creation; a touch on the Great Helm would kill any who had not the protection of Eadran’s bloodline.
Haselrig sighed and drew back his hand. Even with the confidence, born of observation, that the swords would not destroy him he dared not risk touching them. He was not good as a spectator on the phenomenon of pain and certainly worse as a participant in it.
Once Xander had been destroyed through his inadvertent attempt to wear the Helm in place of its rightful heir the witch-queen, they had only had the services of the prisoner Udecht who had been able to handle Eadran’s relics in safety. It was a trust which the bishop had abused by carrying The Father to the witch on that tumultuous day when she had infiltrated the citadel and first worn the Helm.
By all accounts the damage she could inflict with the blade in battle had been formidable. On the morning of her capture, Haselrig had witnessed her sever a harpy’s neck as though it were made of butter and thrust through orcish chainmail with no more difficulty than a pin might pierce silk.
Although the witch had escaped from her second excursion to the captured citadel, she had only managed this time to take the Helm. The blades both remained behind where Udecht had last laid them. However, with the bishop gone, the keenest swords in the Petred Isle were unusable by the forces of Maelgrum and inaccessible to the witch-queen. It was just one in a collection of ironies which Haselrig had been accumulating.
He gently closed the lid of the box, wondering again how he might fan the dying embers of his favour with the Dark Lord into some more substantial and sustainable flame. Unlocking some secret of the swords had been his first instinct, maybe finding a weakness in the bloodline magic, but he couldn’t even lift the things out of the chest. He knelt before it, shaking his head in frustration.
“What’s in the box, book-keeper?”
Haselrig sprang to his feet, clenching down on his spasming bladder as he turned to face the newcomer. He smoothed his cloak and muttered, “nothing, Rondol.”
The red-bearded sorcerer towered in the doorway a scowl across his face. “You lie badly book-keeper.”
“Have a look then.” Haselrig smiled at the brief image of Rondol blasted out of his senses by the shock of handling one of the swords, but the image quickly faded. Rondol was no orc or outlander to be so easily fooled.
However, Maelgrum’s former chief servant had other thoughts on his mind. The chest was forgotten as he sought out the one comfortable chair at the head of the work bench and lifted up the tin flask in which Haselrig kept his liquid courage. The lightness of the container amused the sorcerer. He shook it, listening to the faint swish of spirits within, sniffed at the cap and then drained what was left in one swallow.
Haselrig’s hands trembled lightly. It was a difficult task to prize liquor from the kitchen orcs, or at least an expensive one. With most of Haselrig’s ready gold and jewellery gone, replenishing the contents of the flask would not be an easy task and one he had hoped to postpone until evening at least.
“What do you want, Rondol?” Anxiety at the prospect of a spiritless afternoon made him querulous.
The sorcerer blenched a little at the unexpected boldness of his rival’s tone. “You are very sure of yourself, book-keeper. Or is that you are sure of your new sponsor’s favour towards you, and of the master’s continuing favour for this half-breed.”
“If I told her you’d called her that, Rondol, she’d kill you,” Haselrig said with cold certainty.
The sorcerer paled. “I’d deny it,” he insisted.
“To be honest Rondol, I don’t think Quintala would care whether you did say it or not. She’s just looking for an excuse to kill you.” Haselrig gave a broad smile to fuel Rondol’s insecurity.
“Why does the master favour her so? Fifteen years I have served him, what service has she done to count against that.”
“Well she told us when to expect you for a start, you hirsute fool. Told us of your trial and your exile, made sure we got to you before the wild orcs did. She fed the networks of illegal mages with information, spells and reassurance. Aye, none would have seen her hand in it directly. Always there were intermediaries. But soon enough the criminal users of magic learned not to fear exile, t
o believe they would find friends beyond the barrier. But then you knew that, you just did not see Quintala’s hand at the heart of it.”
“She’s just a mage, like any other, but she is a half-“ He stopped himself and made a careful correction. “She’s a half-elf.”
“Rondol, the master’s faith in her is great, surprisingly so it’s true. Even I, who have known them both throughout this seventeen year adventure, cannot fathom quite what must have passed between them in the years of their private conversations.” Haselrig drew a breath. “My advice to you, and this is sincerely meant, is do nothing to annoy her. Though in faith your very presence annoys her.”
Rondol stood up with a sniff. “I think, book-keeper, that I have enough wits to work that out for myself. Your sincerity is as unnecessary as it is false.”
The sorcerer took a determined stride towards the door. Haselrig called after him, with more courage than he felt, “And by a corollary, Rondol and with equal sincerity. Do nothing to annoy me, though in faith your very presence annoys me.”
Rondol stood in silent fury for a moment, the tips of his ears flushing scarlet enough to blend in to his hair. Then, without another word, the sorcerer stormed from the room.
***
Kimbolt pulled on the cord. He hoped the ropes were tight enough, he hoped they weren’t too tight. Niarmit looked up at him and gave a grim nod of satisfaction, though her hands were pale where the bindings bit deep enough to restrict her circulation. He stepped back to admire his handiwork and was grateful that there were so few witnesses to the event. Kaylan would not have understood. In fact Kimbolt didn’t really understand, he just obeyed. Obedience to orders was the only stricture which held his raging emotions in check.
The queen sat in her throne, the heavy chair which Rugan had secured in the new formed council chamber. Her wrists were tied to the arms of the seat, her ankles to the legs,
“It’s too tight, Kimbolt” Giseanne said. “You’re hurting her.”