Not Really the Prisoner of Zenda

by Joel Rosenberg

  One quick looping of that spiked Therranji garrote over the baron’s head, a sharp tug that would have probably broken the baron’s neck and surely would have crushed his windpipe …

  … and the man who called himself Dereken could have been on his way up the stairs to the ramparts, and down the outer walls, sliding down the rope much more quickly than he had climbed up.

  But, of course, life never was easy, and a mercenary soldier should be used to that.

  The keep itself was relatively quiet, but not completely. That was to be expected, even out here in the hinterlands. Dereken had served in Biemestren, and liked the constant noise and bustle of the capital. Standing guard as part of the Keranahan contingent, even at the outer ramparts of the castle, had been less boring than such things usually were, what with servitors from the castle kitchens bringing meals and tea — iced or hot, depending on the season. And some of those servitors had been young and female.

  As he made his way into the great hall, the only sounds he could hear came from the kitchens. He kept near the walls — his employer had told him that there were more than a few squeaky floorboards between the old long table and the archway that led to the stairways up into the Residence proper.

  He would have said this was too easy, but as a matter of policy and temperament he had never really accepted the notion of something actually being too easy, and this didn’t seem like a time to start.

  The Residence had originally been a three-story, fairly slim tower — built during one of the pre-Holtish dynasties; Euar’den, perhaps — but it had been expanded by a series of attached structures that included the great hall and the kitchen on one side and a combination servants’ residence and officers’ barracks on the other, and nowadays it was just a staircase, a widdershins spiral of stone blocks set into the wall of the castle itself, that opened on the second and third floors.

  Every ten steps or so, a steel spike had been driven in between the immense blocks that made up the structure, but oil lamps were hanging from only about half of them, and of those, only two were lit, hissing and sputtering as they shed a wan, weak light that Dereken would just as soon have lived without, despite its weakness.

  Light was not his friend tonight.

  He blew out each of these as he passed. Darkness was his friend and ally, and while it was difficult to admit it to himself, it was good to have a friend and ally, for once.

  He passed through the archway and into the hall, keeping close to the edge of the archway more out of superstition than reasoning. After all, if there was anybody awake to see him framed in the doorway, he was a dead man.

  But there wasn’t. No guard stood or even slept on watch outside the half-open door at the end of the hall. Dereken stood next to the doorway, and listened, silently, to the quiet sounds inside. It took him a moment to be sure that there were two in there — one barely snoring, the other simply breathing slowly, in sleep — before he walked in.

  Under a rumpled pile of light sheets that were more than were needed on such a warm night, two forms lay, intertwined.

  He closed his eyes for a moment, and tried to imagine strangling the baron, then — after gagging her, of course — quickly mounting the woman sleeping with him. It would be a stupid thing to do, but …

  But he couldn’t even get excited at the prospect; the geas bound his mind too tightly. He couldn’t even produce a distant relish at the notion of slitting her throat quietly, which is what he would rationally have preferred to do, all things being equal. A quick poke would be available for a few coppers in the nearest town, after all, and if he found that inconvenient, there was always a peasant’s shack.

  Unless, of course, it wasn’t Lady Leria.

  The thought of that made him smile above and stiffen below. Hmmm … well, of course it wasn’t the Lady Leria; it simply couldn’t be a noble lady. Naturally, unless there had been a marriage, a noble lady would be keeping her noble hymen intact for her wedding, and as long as Dereken could make himself believe that, he could mount her, kill her, and be gone, and no matter that his supposed employer had made it clear that she was not to be touched.

  Rumor had it that before Baron Keranahan’s reappearance, there had been serious talk in Biemestren that she might even marry the Emperor himself. Her bloodline was certainly adequate — she was, by some accounts, rightfully the Euar’den heir to what had centuries before been conquered by the first Prince Holt and renamed Holtun. And the drawing Dereken had seen and the rumors he had heard about her face and form were intriguing enough. It would be interesting to poke a noble lady and see if they actually were any different.

  But it wasn’t worth risking even a few gold coins, and it certainly wasn’t worth his life.

  A bulbous oil lamp stood on the nightstand on the right side of the bed — the baron slept on the right side, so Dereken had been told — with the wick trimmed to the point where it barely flickered.

  One of the forms mumbled something, then shifted on the bed, although the mattress itself didn’t seem to move. You could never quite figure out nobility — if Dereken could have, he would have slept on the softest of soft down mattress that ever there was, but it looked like this idiot had one stuffed with horse hair or something.

  Well, while Dereken was, by nature, a curious sort — his long-dead father had often beaten him for asking too many questions, and that, of course, had merely made him ask even more questions — he had learned, painfully, that there was a time and place for everything, including curiosity, and this clearly wasn’t one of those.

  He reached behind and loosened his spiked Therranji garrote with one hand, while he unsheathed his dagger with his other hand.

  Loop the garrote over the baron’s head, jerk it tight, then slip his hand over the baron’s bedmate’s mouth — surely not the Lady Leria, of course, of course, it simply couldn’t be her, of course, of course — and it would all be over in a matter of the few final heartbeats.

  He didn’t waste any time as he stood over the baron’s sleeping form; with one hand he yanked the pillow away, and slipped the garrote over —

  It slipped through the baron’s neck, slowed down no more than if it had been sliding through a wisp of smoke, a flame, or a bad dream.

  Dereken tried to turn and run — but found that his muscles wouldn’t obey him. The baron wasn’t dead; he had just turned into some sort of intangible phantom, and the geas wouldn’t permit Dereken to flee just because of that.

  Light flared from behind him, impossibly bright, unreally silent.

  He might not be able to run, but he could defend himself with his knife — and his feet, fists, elbows, and knees, if it came to that.

  But as he started to turn, dropping the garrote to reach for the forearm-long dagger strapped to his back, the two bodies in the bed simply disappeared, gone in an eyeblink, like the flame of a candle that has been blown out.

  “Stand easy, man, and it’s just possible that you might live out the night,” sounded from behind him.

  He finished his turn, his fingers clutching at the dagger’s hilt.

  Standing in the doorway were two men. One of them, sixtyish and in gray wizard’s robes, held a short stick — much shorter than the usual wizard’s staff; it was about the length of a typical truncheon — out and to the side, not squinting in the incredibly bright light issuing from its tip, bathing the room in painful brilliance.

  The wizard was about Dereken’s height, and his thinning gray hair was bound back, tight to his head. His too-well-trimmed beard seemed awfully short and stylish for a wizard, and his smile revealed overly even, too-white teeth.

  “My name is Erenor,” he said. “Some call me Erenor the Great. Then again, others call me Erenor the Barely Adequate, At Best. I’m not offended either way.”

  The other one snorted at that. Half a head taller than the wizard, he was simply the ugliest man that Dereken had ever seen. His thick face was heavy-jawed, with sunken, piggish eyes under heavy brows that almost met his
hairline. His mouth was too small for him, and his double chins should have belonged to a rich merchant, and not a soldier with the blue and gray piping of Keranahan at the hem and cuffs of his jacket, and a pair of singlesticks clutched firmly and easily in his hands.

  A beard would have covered the double chins and the twisted mouth, but there was nothing much that could have been done about the sunken, piggish eyes.

  The right thing to do, the only thing to do, would be to run for the window, to get away, and every instinct told Dereken that that was exactly what he should be doing, but …

  But there was no baron here. Of course — the baron had been made to vanish, transported elsewhere. And that meant that this Erenor was something rather more than some local hedge-wizard, even more than the masked wizard that this employer had brought in to place the geas on Dereken.

  But spells took preparation, and Dereken knew enough about wizardry to know that they could keep only a small number of spells coiled in their minds at one time, ready to be shot forth like the quarrel of a crossbow. Surely this wizard would have some spell ready to protect himself … but perhaps if Dereken threw something at him — his knife would do — to distract both him and the ugly man for just a moment, and then leaped through the open window and hoped that he didn’t shatter his ankles on the stones below …

  It was a slim chance, but his only one.

  Until Baron Keranahan stepped into the room, a pistol in his hand, as well.

  Dereken might be able to distract one long enough to flee, but the window was easily five, six steps away, and the other would surely cut him down before he made it halfway.

  And Baron Keranahan? As a boy, he had fled his title to make his name adventuring in the Katharhd, and had returned just before the Emperor and Parliament were to award it to his half-brother.

  Dereken could not leave him alive.

  Forinel, Baron Keranahan was taller than either of the others, with the broad jaw and sharp cheekbones of the Keranahan dynasty, leavened perhaps by the dark eyes topped by almost feminine eyelashes that he must have inherited from his mother. He held a pistol leveled at Dereken, as well, but he held it awkwardly, unlike the short sword that he held in his right hand.

  “I’m known as Forinel, Baron Keranahan,” he said. “You have my word that if you’ll tell me who sent you, you’ll depart a free man. An outlaw, mind, guaranteed death if you don’t flee the Empire. But a free man.”

  The wizard smiled at that, his eyes twinkling in the light from his faerie torch. “But there’s plenty of world beyond the Empire, and some of us, at least, have been known to flee a town from time to time.”

  “Shut up,” the ugly one said. His voice was higher-pitched than Dereken would have guessed it would be, but there was no anger or heat in his voice.

  “But, I —”

  “Shut your hole, Erenor.”

  Dereken was stunned at the wizard’s reaction: he just bowed, albeit sarcastically, in feigned apology, although his eyes never left Dereken’s face as he spoke.

  “Yes, Pirojil, of course. I live but to obey.”

  Fleeing wasn’t possible, and Dereken had no illusions that his geas would permit him to tell what little he knew. There was only one solution.

  With no hesitation, no windup, he flipped his knife at the baron, hoping that it would land point-first.

  But, just as the garrote had, it passed through the baron’s neck, and clattered against the wall beyond.

  And then the ugly one was upon him, the sticks swinging swiftly.

  Dereken ducked under the first blow and launched himself at Pirojil, the ugly man, lashing out with fists and elbows and knees and head. He simply couldn’t be taken — they would have him tortured to extract what little he knew, and since he would be unable to talk, all he had to look forward to was an eternity of pain.

  But the sticks moved more quickly and deftly than they should have in the hands of such a clumsy-looking man. One battered his hands away to his sides, while a poke from the other caught him in the middle of the gut, sending him, retching, to his knees.

  Distantly, he felt his hands taken behind him and bound, and he was dragged upright to his knees. The smiling wizard took hold of his shoulders — his grip was far stronger than Dereken would have guessed — while the other one lifted him by his hair, the length of one of his sticks resting against Dereken’s throat.

  “He’s been made safe, Forinel,” Pirojil said.

  Again, the baron walked out from behind the door, holstering the pistol behind his back.

  His face was emotionless, in a way far more frightening than anger would have been. He unsheathed a knife from his belt and took a step forward.

  “No,” Pirojil said. “You gave your word.”

  “Well, actually, no,” Erenor said, “he didn’t.”

  He held tightly to Dereken’s right ear with one hand while the other lightly fluttered up and down Dereken’s tunic, removing his purse and his spare knife, but missing the hidden garrote and small, scabbarded knife that Dereken had tied to his upper thigh. “It was my seeming, after all, and not really the baron.”

  “He would have killed her, too, Pirojil,” the baron said. “He would have slit her throat in the bed, while she slept next to me, Pirojil.”

  Why the baron was pleading with an ordinary soldier was something that Dereken didn’t understand. Enough to understand that, appearances to the contrary, this Pirojil was in charge here, and if Dereken was to bargain for his life, it would be with him, and not with the baron.

  Erenor shook his head. “He’s just a tool, no more than a knife. You don’t blame the tool — blame the man who uses it. If you need to destroy a tool, go out into the hall and break his knife, and let’s see if we can get some answers out of the man. At least he can talk.”

  “That is, of course,” Pirojil said, “if you agree to that, Baron Keranahan. It’s your choice, of course. It’s your word.”

  “If he’s not just another of your seemings, wizard,” Dereken said. “I’d not take the word of an illusion.”

  This Erenor didn’t look like a wizard — from his manner and the cut of his clothes Dereken would have guessed him to be a guard officer, possibly, or more likely a minor noble.

  But …

  “Oh, this one’s no seeming,” Erenor said. “Your little toys — and such nasty little toys they are, aren’t they? — went right through my seemings. They’re just illusions, after all. But the baron is solid enough, and that’s easy enough to prove. You want to persuade him of that, Baron?”

  Keranahan’s brow furrowed.

  “Please. I think he’s still skeptical.” Erenor jerked his chin at Dereken. “Touch him.”

  A vague smile crossed the baron’s lips. He took a step forward and backhanded Dereken across the mouth so hard that lights danced in Dereken’s eyes. His hand seemed harder than any noble’s hand had a right to.

  Dereken’s own blood tasted salty in his mouth, but somehow the feeling was reassuring rather than frightening. It wasn’t the first time he had tasted his own blood, after all.

  “If you tell us everything you know, you’ll live. Just as the seeming said.” The baron’s lips tightened. “Unless you ever, ever take a step in her direction. Just once, take just one step toward her, no matter how far away you are, and if you have time to look around you’ll find me behind you.”

  Pirojil’s face was impassive, but Erenor rolled his eyes.

  “Always the hero, our … baron is,” Erenor said. “Still, don’t think he doesn’t mean it — although how you’re expected to know where she is all the time escapes me, as does how, if you’re off in, say, Pandathaway, you’re supposed to know which steps might lead you ever-so-slightly closer to her. But you get the idea.”

  “Do you swear it?” Dereken asked. “Will your wizard here put you under a geas?”

  Erenor chuckled. “A geas? That’s not my specialty. They’re far too real and substantial for an illusionist like myself. And,
other than that, if the truth be known — and it is, from time to time, if not often — when it comes to anything other than illusions, I’m not very much of a wizard at all.”

  Keranahan eyed him levelly. “I don’t need spells to bind me to my word, and you do have my word.”

  “Take it or leave it,” Pirojil said.

  “Please leave it.” Erenor chuckled. He was enjoying himself by all appearances, although Dereken didn’t trust the appearances much. “I want to see how he does this.” His eyes hardened. “And, truth be told, and even a liar tells the truth now and then, I’m ordinately fond of the lady myself, and don’t much take to somebody who would have slain her in her betrothed’s bed.” He patted Dereken on the cheek, and the gentleness of that was more frightening than the baron’s meaty slap. “You’re quite lucky that she’s not even in Keranahan at the moment, or the baron wouldn’t be so generous.”

  Dereken would have shrugged, but Pirojil probably would have taken that as some sort of attempt to escape and beaten him senseless, so he didn’t.

  So be it.

  I am under a geas.

  He could say that, and they would understand why he couldn’t say any more. He wouldn’t have to say any more — they’d find some wizard to break it, like a locksmith opening another’s lock. It would take time, and perhaps a trip to Biemestren — the Emperor’s wizard was, understandably, the best in the Empire — and perhaps during that time there would be a chance to escape.

  He would certainly try.

  “I am under a —”

  ***

  There are things that you don’t miss until they are gone, the assassin thought, as his heart stopped.

  He would have sworn that he had had rarely either heard or felt the gentle thud-thud-thud as it beat within his chest, but it had always been there, and now it was gone.

  He’d always thought that when your heart stopped you were dead, immediately, right then and there.

  Oh, he had heard stories about soldiers continuing the fight with an arrow or a spear or a bullet through their heart, and he had certainly learned early that a man didn’t die right away simply because you’d run him through.