Prince of Fools (The Red Queen's War)

by Lawrence, Mark

  Whilst I’d successfully steered the conversation away from Rhone, Snorri had told me absolutely nothing to ease my mind. I chewed on all that he’d said for the next few miles and very sour it tasted. We were pursued, I knew it, blood to bone. That thing from the opera stalked us, and in running before it we plunged headlong into whatever the Dead King placed in our path.

  • • •

  A day later we met our first examples of the type of Rhonishmen I’d been warning Snorri against. A guard post of five Rhone soldiers attached to a sizable inn that straddled the border. Red March’s own guard post of four men adjoined the opposite end of the inn, and the two groups dined together most evenings on opposing sides of a long table through which the border ran, marked across the planks by a line of polished nail heads.

  I introduced myself as a down-at-heels nobleman since none of them would recognize a Red March prince and, thinking themselves mocked, would take offence. I suppose I could have held up a gold crown with Grandmother’s face on it and remonstrated about the family resemblance, but I didn’t have one. Or a silver crown. And the coppers mostly had the Iax Tower on them or King Gholloth, who reigned before Grandmother and looked nothing like his daughter or me.

  Snorri said little at the inn, his tension clear, worried that word might have been sent to secure the borders against him. We spent the remainder of my coppers on a small meal of cabbage soup and mystery meat before moving on into Rhone, which despite my misgivings, seemed very much like Red March, except that the people tended to roll out their r’s in an annoying manner.

  The first Rhonish town we came to coincided with our first evening. A sizable place with the dull but worthy name of Milltown. We rode at gentle pace along the muddy high street, a thoroughfare crowded with traders, travellers, and townsfolk. Snorri reined in towards a smithy open to the street and loud with hammers.

  “We should get you a sword, Jal.” He’d taken to calling me Jal, not “my prince,” or “Prince Jalan,” or even “Jalan,” but “Jal.” I didn’t let him know it annoyed me because he’d just do it exactly the same amount of times but with a broader grin. “How are you with a blade?”

  “Better than you are with a horse,” I said.

  Snorri snorted and his mare joined in. He’d called her Sleipnir after some heathen nag, and they seemed to be getting on despite him riding like a big log stuck on a saddle, and weighing about the same as his steed. He dismounted, the effect not dissimilar to the aforementioned log falling off its perch.

  “Show me?” He pulled out his sword and offered it hilt first.

  I looked around. “You can’t just go swinging swords on the main street. Someone will lose an eye! And that’s only if the town-law aren’t on you first.”

  Snorri looked puzzled, as if on the ice-coated slopes of the North it would be the most natural thing in the world. “It’s a blacksmith’s.” He waved to the ironmongery laid out beside us. “The smith makes swords. People must try them out here all the time.” The sword hilt poked my way again.

  “I doubt it.” Hands firmly on the reins. I nodded down to the display tables—scythe blades, baling hooks, nails, and other domestic goods were all that lay before me. “Town this size might have a weapon-smith somewhere. This ain’t it, though.”

  “Ha!” Snorri pointed to a sword hanging up back in the gloom under the awnings. “Smith!”

  The smith emerged at Snorri’s booming, a short man, ugly with sweat, thick in the arms of course but with a surprising bookish look to him. “Evenin’.”

  “I’ll test that blade.” Snorri pointed to the hanging sword.

  “Repairing that for Garson Host,” the smith said. “Taking out the notches, putting a fresh edge on it. T’aint for sale.”

  “Don’t humour him.” I nodded my approval at the man.

  The smith bit his lip. I’d forgotten that Rhonish men always look for a chance to put a Red March man on his arse, and that common men like nothing better than seeing their betters knocked about. I would have been wiser to hold my tongue. Snorri might be a foreigner but at least he hadn’t committed the cardinal sin of being a foreigner from the country next door.

  “Don’t s’pose Garson’ll mind if it’s three notches I knock out of the blade or five notches.” The smith went back and reached up to retrieve the sword.

  Resigned to my fate, I dismounted and took the hilt that Snorri poked at me again. It happens that I’m not that bad a swordsman when my life’s not in danger. In the practice yard with dull blades and sufficient padding I could always hold my own well enough. More than well. But all those lessons went running down one leg on the only day I was ever called on to swing a sword in earnest. As we crashed in amongst those Scorron soldiers up in the Aral Pass, raw terror washed away all my training in an instant. Those were great big angry men with sharp swords actually wanting to cut pieces off me. It’s not until you’ve seen a red gaping wound and all the complex little bits inside a man all broken up and sliced open, and known that they weren’t ever getting back together again, and vomited your last two meals over the rocks . . . it’s not until then that you understand the business of swords properly and, if you’re a sensible man you vow to have nothing to do with it ever again. I remember nothing from the battle in the Aral Pass but frozen moments shuffled together—steel flashing, crimson arcs, horrified faces, one man choking on blood as he backed away from me . . . and the screaming, of course. I still hear that today. Everything else about the battle is a blank.

  Snorri took his new sword in his uninjured hand and jabbed at me. I swatted it away. He grinned and came at me again. We traded thrusts and parries for a few moments, the clash of steel bringing much of the street to a halt, heads turning our way. Usually strength, while important, is not the prime factor in swordwork, even with heavier blades of the type we employed. The rapier is all about quickness, but even the longsword is more about quickness, once you have the strength to swing it, than it is about excess strength. Properly trained, a swordsman will benefit more from a small increase in skill and speed than from a large increase in strength. The sword is, after all, a lever. With Snorri, however, strength was a factor. He used basic enough moves, but blocking them made my hand hurt, and the first blow he put any real effort into nearly took the blade from my grasp. Even so, it was clear quite early on that I had more sword skills in my right hand than the Norseman had in his left.

  “Good!” Snorri lowered his weapon. “You’re very good.”

  I tried not to simper under his praise. “Grandmother requires that all her family be well versed in the arts of war.” Whether they want to be or not . . . I recalled endless training as a young prince, gripping a wooden blade until I got blisters, and being beaten mercilessly by Martus and Darin, who saw it as part of their duties as elder brothers.

  “Keep the sword,” Snorri said to me. “You’ll make better use of it than me.”

  I pursed my lips. As long as having the sword didn’t mean I had to use it, then I was fine with the arrangement. I certainly cut a better swagger with a longsword at my hip. I tilted the blade and let the light run along it. At one point the metal had taken on a dark stain. Perhaps where it had bit into the unborn when Snorri swung at its body. I pushed the memory away.

  “What about you?” I asked, concerned with my safety rather than his.

  “I’ll buy a replacement.” He turned to the smith, who made no effort to hide his disappointment at not seeing the giant Viking squash me.

  “You can’t afford another sword!” He couldn’t afford anything—he’d been a prisoner for months until his recent escape. Not the most lucrative of occupations.

  “You’re right.” Snorri handed the smith’s sword back. “It’s not for sale in any case.” He nodded into the forge. “Do you have a good axe? A war-axe, not something for cutting wood.”

  As the smith headed in to delve through his stock, Snorri pulled
a pouch on a string from about his neck. I crowded over to see what he had. Silvers! At least five of them.

  “Who’d you murder for those?” I frowned, more at the thought of Snorri being richer than me than at the thought of robbery with violence.

  “I’m not a thief.” Snorri lowered his brows.

  “All right, we’ll call it pillage,” I said.

  Snorri shrugged. “Viking lands are poor, the soil sparse, winters cruel. So some do reach out and take from the weak. It’s true. We Undoreth, however, prefer to take from the strong—they have better stuff. For each longboat launched against distant shores there are ten and more launched to raid close neighbours. The Viking nations waste their main strength on each other and have always done so.”

  “You still haven’t answered the question.”

  “I took from the strong!” Snorri grinned and reached out to take the axe the smith brought him. “That big man with Taproot when we left? The Amazing Ronaldo! Circus strongman.” No Norse axe this, but a serviceable footman’s axe, a single triangular blade, the ash haft iron-banded and dark with age. The axe was ever a peasant’s weapon, but this one at least had been made for a peasant signed to some lord’s levy. Snorri twirled it, coming alarmingly near to the stock tables, me, and the smith. “The Amazing Ronaldo made a wager with me regarding a feat of strength. He didn’t win. That dwarf said they’ll call him the Amazed Ronaldo now!” Snorri hefted the axe and held the blade close to his ear as if listening to it. “I’ll take it.”

  “Three.” The smith held up the appropriate number of fingers as if Snorri hadn’t been speaking the Empire Tongue.

  “He’s robbing you! Three silvers for what’s basically a farm implement?”

  But Snorri paid over the coins. “Never haggle over a weapon’s price. Buy or don’t buy. Save the arguments for when you own it!”

  “We’ll have to get you a sword,” I said. “When funds allow.”

  Snorri shook his head. “An axe for me. Swords trick you into thinking you can defend. With an axe all you can do is attack. That’s what my father named me. Snorri. It means ‘attack.’” He lifted the axe above his head. “Men think they can defend against me—but when I knock, they open.”

  • • •

  “What the hell are unborn?” It took three days for me to ask the question. We’d come riding into the town of Pentacost, covering about a hundred miles from the border. Snorri still rode like a log, but fortunately he also endured like a log and hadn’t murmured a word of complaint. Rain found us on the road and poured on our heads for the last ten miles, so we came dripping from the stables and now sat at the centre of our own little lakes, steaming gently before an empty hearth in the King of Rhone tavern.

  “You don’t know?” Snorri raised wet eyebrows at that and plastered his hair farther up his forehead, shaking the excess water from his fingers.

  “No.” I’m often like that. I have a bad habit of blanking unpleasantness from my mind—something I’ve done since I was a child. Genuine surprise is a great help when faced with an unwelcome duty. Of course, when it’s the paying of debts you’re forgetting, that can lead to broken fingers. And worse. I guess it’s a form of lying—lying to oneself. And I’m very good at falsehoods. They often say the best liars half-believe their lies—which makes me the very best because if I repeat a lie often enough I can end up believing it entirely, no half measures involved! “No, I don’t know.”

  During our travels, mainly down dull and muddy tracks and past innumerable dreadful little farms, I’d spent a lot of time reminiscing to myself about Cherri’s charms and Lula’s pleasing sense of exploration, but of the incident at the graves . . . nothing, just a brief memory of Cherri riding to the rescue. A dozen times I’d pictured the bouncing of her breasts as she’d thundered past. It took a three-hour soaking at the end of a three-day ride for the unborn to at last surface with a nagging insistence that finally made me ask. The truth could scarcely be worse than what my imagination had begun to suggest. I hoped.

  “How can you not know?” Snorri demanded. He didn’t thump the table, but I knew he wanted to.

  Snorri proved the ideal travelling companion for a man like me who didn’t want to dwell on past mistakes and the like. As far as Snorri was concerned all his goals, ambitions, loves, and dangers lay ahead—anything in our wake, Red March and all its peoples, Grandmother and her Silent Sister, the unborn, all these things of the South, were to be left behind, outpaced, no longer of concern or consequence.

  “How can you not know?” he repeated.

  “How can you not know what eleven times twelve is?”

  “A hundred and thirty-two.”

  Damn. “I’m just more interested in the finer things in life, Snorri. If you can’t ride it—one way or another—and it doesn’t play dice, or cards, or pour from a wine bottle, then I’m really not that bothered. Especially if it’s foreign. Or heathen. Or both. But this . . . thing . . . said something that worried me.”

  “Quarry.” Snorri nodded. “It was sent after us.”

  “By? The other day you said it might be the Dead King, but couldn’t it be someone else?” I wanted it to be someone else. “Some necromancer or—”

  “The Dead King is the only one who can send the unborn anywhere. They laugh at necromancers.”

  “So. This Dead King. I’ve heard of him.”

  Snorri spread his hands, inviting more of my wisdom on the subject.

  “A Brettan lord. Some godless island-hopper from the Drowned Lands.” I sipped my wine. A Rhonish red. Vile stuff, like vinegar and pepper. Other countries wouldn’t be so bad if they weren’t crammed with foreigners and all their stuff. This Dead King was a case in point.

  “That’s it? That’s what you know about the Dead King? ‘He’s from the Drowned Isles.’” It seemed to me that the steam was coming off Snorri rather more rapidly now.

  I shrugged. “So why would some Brettan send a monster after us? How would he even know? I bet Maeres Allus put him up to it. Six will get you ten. Maeres Allus!”

  “Ha!” Snorri drained his ale, wiped the foam from his moustache, and made to order another before remembering our poverty. “That, Jal, would be like a minnow ordering a whale. This Allus of yours is nothing. Get ten miles from the walls of your city and nobody knows the man.”

  Prince Jalan, damn it! Ten miles outside my city and nobody knows I’m a prince. “So why send the monster?”

  “The Dead King and this Silent Sister, they’re hidden hands, they play a game across the empire, them and others, pushing kings and lords across their board. Who knows what it is they want in the end? Perhaps to remake the empire and give it an emperor with strings by which he can be made to dance, or perhaps to wipe the board clear and start the game anew. In any event the unborn said we carried the Red Queen’s purpose, and then it said we carried magic. Which we do.” He jabbed a finger at my shoulder and that unpleasant crackling energy built immediately, remaining until he withdrew the offending digit.

  “But that was some kind of accident! We’re not on anyone’s purpose! Certainly not my grandmother’s.” Not unless the Silent Sister’s blind eye saw into the future and selected an unlikely chance. An unsettling thought. She was, after all, battling the dead, and Snorri was dragging both me and the witch’s magic north to where his foes worked alongside corpse-men brought in on the black ships of the Drowned Isles. “It’s just coincidence!”

  “So maybe the unborn was wrong, the Dead King too. Maybe we’ve got them, the Silent Sister, and even your weasel Allus on our trail. Let them come. We’ll see how much staying power they have! It’s a long way to the North.”

  “So,” I said, returning to my theme. “What the hell is an unborn?” I had a vague memory of the name from before the nightmare journey began. I think the first time I heard it I had rather hoped they were just risen corpses, which given their size woul
d be easily dealt with. Not that I’m keen to stamp on babies, dead or otherwise, but it’d be a sight less dangerous than what happened at the circus. “And how the hell is an ‘unborn’ a huge grave-horror that takes a charging elephant to put down?”

  “Potential, that’s what the unborn are. Potential.” Snorri picked up his empty tankard, checked its emptiness, and put it down again. “The one we faced wasn’t so dangerous as it had only been dead a few hours. All that potential for growth and change a child has—all that goes to the deadlands if the child dies unborn. It becomes twisted there. Soured. Time passes differently there, nothing stays young. The unborn child’s potential is infected with older purpose. There are things that have always been dead, things that dwell in the Land Beyond Death, and it’s those ancient evils that ride the unborn potential, possess and haunt it, hungry to be born into the world of life. The longer the unborn stays in the deadlands, the more strength it draws from that place but the less it can change, the harder it becomes to return. No common necromancer can summon an unborn. Even the Dead King is said to have been able to bring through only a handful, and seldom in a place of his choosing. They serve as his agents, his spies, able to grow into new forms, disguise themselves, walk amongst men unseen for what they are.”

  “New ones are not so dangerous?” I’d latched onto that and repeated it to myself in disbelief whilst the rest of what he said washed over me. “It would have ripped you in half if not for a handy elephant! Let’s hope we don’t ever meet another one, because elephants are in short supply around here, if you hadn’t noticed. Christ!”

  Snorri shrugged. “You did ask.”

  “Well, I wish I hadn’t. Remind me not to in future.” I took a deep draught of my wine, regretting that we lacked the wherewithal to buy enough to get roaring drunk and wash the whole business back into convenient amnesia.

  “There was something there that night at the opera.” I didn’t want to speak about it, but things could hardly get worse.