by Dave Duncan
“I’m very, very grateful to you both for your support today,” Rhys said. “Tomorrow, if you’d help us carry the deceased out before you leave, I’d appreciate that a lot, too.”
“We can stay and watch the balefire burn, if you want,” Trusty said. “Personally, I have very few appointments lined up for the next ten years.”
“Nor I. If you just happen, sir,” Sharp asked Spender, “to have a list of beautiful young heiresses in the district needing husbands, perchance you would lend it to me for a day or two?”
Rhys was happy to see hints of his father’s old smile returning. Today must have been a trial for him, but now he could look forward to the first freedom he had known since he was a child.
“If I had such a thing, lad, I’d be reading through it myself.” Which was a reminder that it was not just the three new knights who were currently poverty-stricken, it was all four of them.
Sharp said, “I do think Spender and Son owe us one thing, though. I don’t want to trespass on any painful memories, sir, but I’d dearly like to know what the significance of that scrappy old box is.”
Having fewer teeth, Spender was eating more slowly than the younger men. He took a moment to swallow what he had been working on, then said, “So would I. I’ve never seen it before in my life.”
Three jaws stopped chewing.
“Well, that’s not quite true,” he went on, in a teasing tone that Rhys remembered from his childhood. “But the first time I saw it was about a week ago, when we both knew he was dying and we had no money to take him to an elementary for a healing. I’d been trying to spoon some nourishment into him, but he’d refused. He’d had another stroke and couldn’t speak. He signed for me to look in the wicker hamper he kept his winter clothes in, what was left. He kept signing deeper, deeper. Right at the bottom I found this box. He gestured that he wanted me to leave it in full view.”
“So you never opened it?” Rhys asked.
“No. I could tell there couldn’t be much in there. It’s definitely of Fitish origin. The grapes and flowers are not Chivian, but the workmanship and art are crude. It’s a cheap replica of the sort of box Fitish ladies keep their jewels in, except that the inside should be partitioned and lined with felt. He couldn’t tell me why he wanted it. Now I know it’s empty. As far as I can see, it isn’t worth a stale bun, but my ward seemed to think it was precious.”
Six hands grabbed, but Rhys was fastest. He took up the box and opened the lid. There had once been a lock, but it had been jimmied off. The illustrations were too faint to study in the dim light, but he’d had a good look at them earlier without making any sense of them, so perhaps they had never been intended as anything more than decoration. This time he closed his eyes and relied on his sense of touch.
After a moment he opened them again and looked at Dad. They exchanged small smiles, so the old man must have found the secret too.
Having passed the box to Trusty, who was closer than Sharp, Rhys stood up. They needed more light, but he had hunted for lamp oil or candles earlier without success. In its nights of glory, before its owner fell into royal disfavour, the hall had been illuminated by half a dozen bronze chandeliers, which were still there, hung on ancient cables. He walked over to the wall where the closest of them was secured, wondering just how heavy the monster would be. Whoever had built the hall must have been able to employ dozens of servants to handle such tasks. As he began to unwind the extra rope from the cleat, Trusty handed the cryptic box to Sharp and ran over to help.
“That thing weighs more than you do, brother. It’ll smash into the floor and you’ll be dangling up there in its place.”
Rhys laughed at the image. “There’s a job I could handle! You think the mayor would employ me as a sconce, holding a candle in my mouth?”
More likely the rope would break or the pulleys fall apart, but there was nothing directly below the monster, so the risk could be taken. As the cleat’s grip on the cable began to weaken, Rhys felt no threat of being hoisted into the air, but he was very glad that staunch Trusty was there beside him. In this case four hands were more than twice as good as two. The rope was filthy and so dry that the surface crumbled in their grip, but it did not snap, and the pulleys overhead also held, squealing in agony at being awakened from their long sleep. When the chandelier was down to head height, they secured it to the cleat again and ruefully dusted off their hands—there was no such thing as soap left in Willow Hall.
Most of the thirty or more candles had burned away completely, but three had guttered and died partway, so a little work with a knife reshaped them until they could be lit. The viewing improved dramatically.
Dad had already worked out the secret of the box. If Rhys had, then so had Trusty and Sharp, for neither was stupid.
Rhys took it up again. “Of course the lid is hollow,” he said. “It is thicker than the base or the sides, and if you squeeze it, you can feel it yield, so it is made of two very thin sheets of wood, not one thick one. Did anyone find a secret clasp? No? Tell us, Noble Ancestor, what can be hidden inside here?”
His father was sitting with his back to the new candlelight. It flickered revealingly on the younger men’s faces, but wrapped his expression in shadow. He shrugged. “I have absolutely no idea. If there is no hidden clasp, then whatever is inside it has been sealed in there for nigh on thirty years.”
“Your ward was still in his right mind, Dad? He left it to you as a bequest, but was he truly grateful for all your long service? It isn’t just some dying man’s delusion? Or a cruel joke?”
“Certainly not! He was a fine gentleman foully abused by his king.” Sir Spender’s binding had not completely faded yet; he could still defend his ward’s memory from slurs.
“Then let’s all guess,” Rhys said. “It can’t be money—no man would live in such humiliating squalor for thirty years if he owned a valuable bill of exchange. My guess is a written account of how badly King Ambrose treated him. Bannerville wanted it preserved until it could be safely published.” He looked questioningly around the group. “Brother Sharp?”
“Love letters? His Lordship left it to Sir Spender so he could blackmail the king.”
A thirty-year old scandal did not sound very dangerous, and blackmailing the king would be life-threatening at best.
“Not gold,” Trusty said. “The bailiffs tested its weight.”
Sharp’s next suggestion was even more bizarre: “A map to hidden treasure?”
Dad sighed. “I won’t even hazard a guess, but I do know this: there’s some sort of conjuration involved.” He smiled at the sudden alarm. “Not much, I’d guess, but I’m one of those people who’s sensitive to spirituality. I’d never have made a sniffer, like the White Sisters, but the Forge at Ironhall used to make me shiver with excitement. As I grew older, I realized that it was almost sexual. I can sense a very slight something in that box. It slides about when I tilt the box, but I can’t hear anything if I shake it.
“So be prepared. And careful. None of us will sleep tonight if we don’t look. The box itself is worth nothing, so why don’t a couple of you strong young men just tear it apart?”
Rhys thought the results might be catastrophic if the box itself were enchanted, but surely Lord Bannerville would not play such a trick on his Blade.
“No need to send two men to do a boy’s work,” he said. He turned the box upside down, holding it by the lid and letting the box itself dangle on its hinges. Then he pulled the lid apart. One end snapped off in his fingers with no trouble. As he expected, it exposed the edges of two thin sheets of wood with a gap between them, the hidden chamber. Not wanting to do more damage, he turned the box on end and shook it over the bench that was serving as a table.
What dropped out was a glove.
Dad said, “Fire and death! No, don’t touch it!”
Gloves usually came in pairs. There ought to be anoth
er. Rhys shook the box, peered in the slit, and finally tore the fake lid apart, but without success. One only.
Dad drew his knife and slid it inside the glove so he could lift it and inspect it up close. The others leaned closer.
“Black on top and yellow underneath?” Sharp said. “It’s a lady’s size. Only a very small man could wear that.”
Sharp laughed. “Only a very foolish one would try. If it were enchanted thirty years ago, won’t the spirituality have worn off by now?”
“No. I told you,” Dad said. “There’s still some.”
“It looks like very soft material,” Rhys suggested.
“It’s velvet,” his father said.
“What’s velvet?”
“A very soft and hugely expensive fabric. Fitish sumptuary laws restrict its use to members of the royal family. Not that Desidéria ever paid any attention to laws.”
“Desidéria?”
For a long moment it seemed that the question would not be answered. Then Dad sighed. “Marquisa Desidéria da Eternidade. She was one of the big players in the Fitish mess. A witch, a very potent and evil witch. She was known as the Cobra, which is Fitish for ‘snake’. Black and gold were her colours.”
Glances were exchanged. It seemed that Sir Spender had spoken truly—perhaps more truly than he had known—when he told the bailiffs that the cryptic box held many memories for him. He had been a virile, vibrant young Blade in Fitain, thirty years ago, so high-born ladies were not impossible, although a marquisa seemed overly ambitious. But witches? Chivial had no witches or wizards. The elementals were conjured inside an octogram, and it took eight chanters to do it.
“Snake?” Trusty asked. “She doesn’t sound very sexy.”
“Oh, she was! She was reputed to be King Afonso’s mistress. Very sexy.”
Trusty and Sharp exchanged glances, no doubt wondering as Rhys had, how well the younger Spender had known the snaky lady. Unable to recall ever seeing Dad look as he did now—almost scared?—Rhys reached over and took the knife so he could examine the glove more closely.
“Two pieces of material sewn together and then turned inside out to hide the seams. Black on top and yellow underneath if you wear it on the right hand. The reverse on the left. It certainly doesn’t look like menswear. In fact, I think it was once much longer, one of those elbow-length gloves ladies wear in the evenings; it’s been cut across at the wrist, so half a glove.”
“I think this is the left one,” Dad said. “I saw her once wearing long two-coloured gloves. She was offering her right hand for men to kiss, and the back of her hand was gold, not black. Of course she could have switched them sometimes.”
Rhys assumed Lord Bannerville’s lips had been included, but in Chivial a marchioness would never acknowledge a mere bodyguard that way. “What about her husband, the marquis? Did he approve of the king’s interest in his wife?”
“There was no marquis,” Dad said. “None that I ever heard of, anyway.”
“So if this glove is, as you suggest, enchanted, then how did your ward acquire it, why did he keep it secret all these years, and why did he leave it to you in his will?”
Spender smiled toothlessly. “I’ve been wondering about the ‘how’ ever since I first saw it. It came from Desidéria, I’m sure. At the end, you see, when Burl and Dragon were dead, Bannerville and I were both badly wounded. We were also hiding out from the Fitish authorities, because one side’s heroes are the other side’s mass murderers. It was Desidéria who saw that we had food and shelter, and eventually she smuggled us out of the country. She must have sent the box to us, but whether she meant it for me or my ward, or for him to keep for me until... now... I don’t know. There’s a lot I don’t remember about those times. As to the ‘why’...”
After another long pause Dad muttered, “Perhaps Sir Sharp wins the contest.”
“Me?” Sharp exclaimed. “A map to hidden treasure?”
Spender suddenly chuckled, shaking his head to throw off his strange mood. “Not a map. I know where the lost money was put. This could be a key to getting to it. Or any one of a dozen other things also.”
“We could take it to the palace and ask the White Sisters what it does—or did,” Rhys suggested.
“I won’t take it anywhere near them,” his father said sharply, “or the king. Don’t get your hopes up, lads! Supposing we believed that it would lead us to the lost treasure, we’d need to take it back to Fitain to use it, and where would we find the money to do that?”
“How much treasure?” Sharp asked.
Dad appraised him for a moment, then said, “A lot. Some of it had been spent, but most of it hadn’t. Roughly ten million crowns.”
Stunned silence. Ten million?
Four unemployed men sitting in moonlight, dreaming impossible dreams... But the thought seemed to hang in the air like the smell of bad meat.
Chapter 5
Old Blades never starve. Rhys remembered Grand Master telling him that on the day he was admitted to Ironhall. The old man hadn’t considered a Blade still bound to a former royal favourite later reduced to poverty. Dad had certainly not grown fat in Bannerville’s service. Nevertheless, there were hundreds of dubbed Blades scattered around Chivial, from lowly stablemen to the king’s lord chancellor, and together they formed a close-knit fraternity with a huge variety of talents on call.
Around noon, Rhys rode his father’s horse up to the gate of Muellet Castle, bringing the mysterious velvet glove in a leather bag hung on his saddle. Lord Bannerville’s funeral had taken up the morning, and now the other three Blades had headed into Ambor to eat at the Bael’s Head, whose table had a good reputation despite the establishment’s name and gruesome signboard, which Rhys recalled from his childhood. Sir Spender was going to hand over the keys of Willows Hall to the local deputy sheriff. Eric and Frank had been dismissed and sent home.
The kings of Chivial had long since forced the nobility to raze all fortifications except those needed to guard the coast against raiding Baels, so Muellet Castle was a castle in name only; in fact, just a nobleman’s home built of brick, probably much more comfortable than its ancient predecessor. It was owned by a Lord Muellet, but the interest it held for Rhys was the wife of its captain-at-arms, Sir Damian. Damian had been three years ahead of him at Ironhall, and thus senior to him in the Royal Guard, and he had married a gorgeous White Sister named Lavender.
The Sisters, commonly referred to as sniffers, were trained to sense the taint of spirituality and thus formed the Blades’ first line of defence for the king. In the process many of them naturally fell victim to the predatory libertines of the Guard, but some found the spirituality of the Blades’ binding repellent. Lavender had been one of those, much to Rhys’s regret, for he had pleaded his heartfelt adoration to Lavender a couple of times and been firmly rejected. So, no doubt, had Damian, but the very day he had been dubbed he had proposed to her and been accepted.
He had then doubled up this disgusting exhibition of good fortune by winning honourable employment as captain of the guard at Muellet Castle, a two-hour ride from Willows Hall, a job which required him to do little more than look ornamental on social occasions. Should war ever come to Chivial, then he would have to lead Lord Muellet’s hayseed militia into battle, of course, but that was a small risk. Since Lavender would be at his side and Rhys knew her, his father had chosen him to go and seek her opinion on the glove, rejecting eager indications of availability from Sharp and Trusty.
The doorman recognized a gentleman in spite of Rhys’s unshaven and travel-worn condition. “I regret to inform you, sir, that Lord and Lady Muellet are not presently...” Then he saw the cat’s eye pommel. “To see Sir Damian, sir? I believe he’s around at the mews. I can send for him, if you wouldn’t mind...”
Rhys said he would be happy to watch his old chum playing with his feathered friends, and asked to be led there.
Clearly Damian had done extraordinarily well for himself, residing in a home almost as grand as one of the king’s lesser palaces. Rhys found him in a large and shady, but well ventilated, shed, chatting to a peregrine perched on his glove. Messing about with hawks and falcons was a very genteel occupation, although talking to them might be carrying matters a little far.
“Does she often talk back?”
Damian glanced around with a dangerous gleam in his eye. Then he beamed, carefully coaxed the bird onto a perching stand, secured its jesses, and turned to greet his visitor. There followed the traditional hand clasps, shoulder thumps, and insults.
“I didn’t think you were due for the order of the royal boot yet, brother. You must have really tweaked the Old Man’s beard.”
“We agreed that our sentiments were mutual. You haven’t gotten too fat yet—not really grossly, I mean.” Rhys then explained that he had come with a conjuration puzzle for Sister Lavender, and admitted that he not yet dined.
“Then you will. Come with me.”
Damian led the way to a secluded terrace, shaded by towering beech trees, enclosed by rose-bearing trellises. In short order servants brought ale. Lavender arrived wearing a stylish summery gown, but still every bit as beautiful as she had been in the white robes and steeple hat of the White Sisters. Rhys was no expert, but he suspected she was partway to becoming a mother. Both men rose, he bowed.
But she cut through ceremony to greet Rhys with a worried frown. “You are welcome, and I can tell that you have been dubbed, but what in the world are you wearing? Or carrying?”
Obviously Dad had been right in believing that the glove had been conjured. Rhys produced the leather bag.
“It’s weird!” she said at once, nodding. “Please sit, both of you.” She took a chair and held out her hand for the mystery.
“Careful, please,” Rhys said. “It may be dangerous.”
“It isn’t. There are death spirits involved, of course, but they are well confined.” She took out the glove and stared at it in astonishment, first the yellow side and then the black. “Velvet, very costly. But it’s as if... Yes, the two sides have been conjured separately, so if you put it on, you’ll be equipped with two separate conjurations.”