by Paul Collins
The Preceptor wrung his hands as he listened, his head bowed and his brow furrowed.
‘The fool, he warned me that he was setting up for a dangerous invocation,’ admitted the Preceptor regretfully when the captain had finished. ‘All right then, fetch my trainee Adept 7 from the town and bring him here to the fortress. Send him to the alchemorium to clean up any lingering focus points and enchantment vortices.’
When the captain had gone and the door was closed again the Preceptor turned to his guest.
‘You are a dangerous man,’ the Preceptor said slowly, shaking with fear yet defiant. ‘Such men eventually meet even more dangerous men, then perish.’
The big man gave a little gesture of deprecation and smiled benignly. ‘I am an Adept 12, so your mage’s death was no great victory.’
Beads of sweat meandered down the Preceptor’s face. ‘If you will be my Adept I can pay –’
‘Not so fast, Preceptor. I do not work for money.’
‘What then?’
‘I would be inclined to defend and protect you as my partner. Do we have a partnership?’
The Preceptor flicked a drop of sweat from the point of his beard. ‘What do you want in return?’
‘I have already told you: the use of your best lancers for some weeks and the obliteration of some difficult and troublesome people who must be killed with discretion. I also want five fast privateers for a strike deep into Hamatriol that I shall make with the two hundred best lancers of your personal guard.’
‘What? Hamatriol? It’s two weeks’ voyage from here, and it’s landlocked behind Gratz.’
‘Yes. We’ll have to ride and fight our way across Gratz first.’
The Preceptor pressed his hands against his temples, squeezing his eyes shut. He counted ten pulses beneath his fingers, then looked at his guest again. ‘Give me that link as a mark of good faith.’
‘Very well, keep the dragonlink until you are upon the Skelt throne.’
‘Agreed.’
‘My calling name is Fa’red.’
‘Fa’red! Fa’red, the mage turned merchant?’ The Preceptor’s eyes narrowed for a moment. ‘You must be in your eighties by now.’
‘Thank you, Preceptor.’
The implication was that he was older rather than younger, but the Preceptor did not pursue the matter. He fingered the link nervously. ‘Are you not going to ask for something in return for this?’ he asked, extending his hand to Fa’red.
Instead of grasping the proffered hand, Fa’red placed a death-scroll in his fingers. ‘Yes. Kill these people.’
The Preceptor glared at him for the slight, but said nothing. He quickly scanned the names on the scroll.
‘Nobody really important … Count Juram? He has risen against me, but what has he done to you?’
‘It’s what he is, not what he has done.’
The Preceptor rolled up the scroll and placed it on the table. ‘In fact, others on this list have been annoying me lately. These lives could be quenched over a month or two, but, however careful I may be, my hand will eventually be traced. Their scabby families and followers will embark upon vendettas against me.’
‘I’ll protect you, but first I must make the raid into Hamatriol. There is a shrine where the main mailshirt of dragonlinks lies and I mean to take it.’
The Preceptor’s eyebrows creased in doubt. ‘You will need an army!’
‘The shrine’s guards protect it against petty thieves and low-ranking rogue Adepts, while the Hamatriol army could stop any invader trying to march overland to seize it. However, a half-brigade of elite lancers led by a high Adept just might be sufficiently swift yet powerful to slip between the cracks in those defences. Have your men ready in two weeks.’
‘Two weeks! I’ll need four –’
‘Two. When I return, I’ll make you the most powerful man in Skelt.’
‘You are doing a great deal for my benefit, Fa’red. What is the real purpose behind our partnership?’
‘I need the power of a great ruler, Preceptor, but if I gained it for myself I would attract the attention of certain … enforcers of certain rules. Why do you think that mages, especially senior Adepts, never become kings? Through you I can achieve the same aims while remaining hidden.’
‘And if I betray you?’ asked the Preceptor boldly.
‘Then you shall die,’ replied Fa’red without hesitation and in the politest of tones.
During the year 2128 the Preceptor of Skelt quickly grew in influence. He annihilated a dozen rival Skeltian warlords on the battlefield, then seized disputed borderlands and islands from Hamaria and the privateer sea-princes. The power and influence of Skelt on the west coast of the continent increased dramatically. True, a number of influential nobles died under strange, tragic, and generally suspicious circumstances, but Skelt was somehow growing strong, rich and important again, so the few scattered deaths scarcely seemed to matter.
Chapter
3
Jelindel cowered back as the lindrak glided towards her, but it was no good. He had seen her, she was as good as dead. She muttered the prayer of life’s release and traced the holy circle in the air with a hand trembling in terror – then two black streaks crashed into the advancing, cowled figure.
The bullhounds dragged the lindrak to the ground in a growling, yelping tangle of teeth and flailing limbs. The other lindraks were back over the wall within moments, and even the bullhounds were no match for five lindraks at once.
The cowled assassin who had seen Jelindel lay still on the grass in the fire’s glare as another bent over him.
There was a twittering, cheeping sound from the kneeling lindrak, then he made as if to tear at his throat with his hand. One of the standing lindraks shrugged and raised his hands, then gave three short sharp whistles. There was a low twitter of reply, then the kneeling lindrak slung his wounded colleague over his shoulders and stood up.
Cowering out of sight, Jelindel watched the lindrak assassins carry their wounded comrade over the wall and out of sight.
Cries of ‘Fire!’ now came from the street beyond the garden wall. Jelindel took two faltering steps towards the roaring, crackling mansion before she realised her family was beyond help. She could hear terrified horses neighing and kicking at their stalls in the stables and this was where she now turned.
Jelindel burst through the door of the stablehands’ quarters. All the stablehands lay dead, their bodies sprawled and contorted in the light of a single tallow candle. Her senses reeled and she clawed at the door for support. She had seen dead sparrows in the garden and dead mice that the cats had caught, but never, never death on this scale.
The sheer enormity of what was before her eyes blunted its horror, and Jelindel was surprised to find herself thinking clearly. The fire could spread. The horses had to be freed.
Without thought for herself she drew aside the heavy bolts of the stall doors and released the wild-eyed horses. The black stallion in the end stall reared and smashed splinters from the gate as Jelindel pushed at the bolt. Pieces of wood struck her and she pressed back against the wall in alarm as the door swung open and the frantic horses bolted out into the garden.
The town bells were by now clamouring their warning and the shouts of a growing crowd came from beyond the wall. There was a dull crash as the main gates were battered from outside. The ram struck the gates three, four, five times as Jelindel pressed herself against the shadows of the stable wall, then they crashed inwards and the yard was suddenly filled with scurrying figures.
The plumed helmets of the city constables were among the teeming press of people in nightshirts carrying framepails, axes, ladders and wetflails.
‘Bodies, there’s bodies everywhere!’ someone shouted from the stablehands’ quarters.
Jelindel’s first thought was to rush out and tell them what had happened, but the sight of so many dark, busy shapes held her back. How many of them might be the shadowy murderers who had been the cause of this nigh
tmare? Her eyes narrowed. Whatever the lindraks’ motives, they would want to ensure that no one had escaped the massacre – and Jelindel was the only survivor. Numbly she snatched up a discarded pail and ran for the ornamental pond. No one noticed what appeared to be the figure of a stable boy as she blended in with the crowd fighting the fire.
Jelindel didn’t sleep at all that night. The mansion burned for three hours, and all that the onlookers could achieve was to put out spot fires in the garden and neigh-bouring buildings.
As Jelindel watched, the full enormity of what had happened pressed down on her ever more heavily with each rafter that fell or wall that collapsed. The mad scurry to stay alive and fighting the fire had held the horrors back, but now she knew that everyone who had been dear to her from the day that she was born was no more. Her entire lineage, wiped out within the space of a hundred heartbeats. She shivered with loneliness in the warm night air, too terrified to ask even for comfort from the priests in the crowd who were there to anoint the dead.
In the middle of a city full of people she was as alone as if cast adrift on a raft on an empty ocean.
As the night progressed towards morning Jelindel gave up all hope of rescuing anything from the ruined mansion. Besides, a dozen constables were there to guard the smouldering ruins against looters and further flare-ups. The mayor’s assessors piled charred bodies into carts while the constable-general declared the causes of death for his scribe to note down. Some of the bodies were quite small.
When dawn began to brighten the sky, Jelindel noticed that one of the constables and his scribe were beginning to take statements from the men who had remained throughout the night. She did not want to be noticed, and her well-educated accent would give her away after a word or two.
‘Be goin’ t’market fer bite, Fergus?’ a man asked his friend.
‘Aye, that I’d like,’ replied the other, and they set off past where Jelindel was crouching.
Wearily, Jelindel followed the pair at a distance, trying to keep track of the narrow cobble stoned streets that they passed along. She was soon lost, however, and completely dependent on her unknowing guides.
The fine houses and mansions gave way to rambling tenements of cinder-brick and wood-shingle, and then these opened onto a wide square filled with gaudy tents and stalls. Displays were being unpacked by astonishingly varied and often strangely dressed people, and the scents of exotic and enticing foods hung heavily on the air. Almost at once Jelindel realised that she had lost the men she had been following. No matter, she would just blend in with the crowd.
She approached a stall with fresh buns cooling from the oven and scooped seven coppers from her purse. ‘If you please, how much do you charge for a bun?’ she asked the rotund woman behind the trestle.
‘If I pleeeese? Do I chaarge?’ screeched the woman, her mottled, warty hands on her hips. ‘Goraw, come listen to this little lambity!’ she called to someone within the stall. When she turned back her mortified victim had fled.
Jelindel wandered for another two hours before daring to open her mouth again. She eventually decided to feign an accent. Nerrissian, that was it! She could make her mother and sisters helpless with laughter with her impersonation of a Nerrissian. Her mother. Her sisters. Tears welled in her eyes but she fought them down.
Haltingly, she approached another vendor and said, ‘What will charging for buns?’ in thick, slow words.
The vendor eyed her shrewdly, recognised her Nerrissian inflexions as a foreign accent … and charged her three coppers instead of one.
As Jelindel walked away eating her bun a Nerrissian sailor called out in his native tongue: ‘Eh lad, they’re worth one. Mind that next time.’
Lad! She was passing for a boy without even being aware of it. The idea somehow came as a shock. Through nothing else but sheer good fortune she had been outside the mansion and dressed as a boy when the lindraks had struck, but that good fortune would not last forever. Now she must learn how to be a boy, and how to earn a living.
The bun had been cheap at the price as far as Jelindel was concerned, but it did remind her of another pressing problem. There were only four coppers left. That was four buns, even if she only drank at the public fountain. After that, what?
She could starve, but that was hardly an option. She could go to the Temple of Verity and seek refuge, but that would mean revealing that she was alive. The lindraks would soon arrive to kill her, and the temple guards would be of little use against them.
Only the King of Skelt could unleash the lindraks, his deadly warriors of the night. Only the King. Had her father offended the King? As a member of the King’s Council of Advisers, he had had a lot of influence with the monarch, but had he taken that influence too far? Earlier that month he had denounced the Preceptor, the ruthless warrior scholar from the south – and the Preceptor was in favour with the King.
In law, the lindraks could only be used in defence of the realm, yet the murderers that Jelindel had seen in the garden the night before could only have been lindraks. Could it be possible that the King would send lindraks against his own loyal subjects? Jelindel fought against the thought but lost.
The sailor had called her lad, and that set her thinking. He had been fooled by her disguise, so it was obviously good. Nobody saw the lindraks and lived; nobody marked for their blades escaped, yet she was still alive. These were two miracles already and she did not want to tempt fate further by having it known that she had survived. She had already passed for a boy so perhaps she could remain a boy. Boys had far more freedom, and a girl living in the marketplace with no guardian or family was unheard of. That meant surviving alone, as a boy, and a foreigner, in secret.
Jelindel had been the youngest girl in a family of six. She had been well tutored in languages, charm-healing, history, music, dancing, needlework, household magic and theology, as well as scores of darker subjects that she had studied on her own initiative … but she had not been taught how to buy buns.
One thing at a time, she said to herself. A boy needs a boy’s name, a plain name that draws no attention. Jaelin, that was a common boy’s name along the whole western coast of the continent.
‘Jaelin, I am Jaelin,’ she told the blue sky, sitting on a barrel amid the market’s impartial turmoil. Suddenly she felt a lot stronger and more confident.
Around noon Jelindel was eating her second sauce bun when she heard a commotion nearby. Being part of a crowd seemed safer than being alone, so she walked over.
‘Call yerself a scribe?’ bellowed a navvy angrily as he waved a sheet of reedbond paper. ‘I took this petition that yer scribed ter the magistrate an’ he couldn’t even read it!’
Jaelin sensed an ugly mood in the crowd as others joined in jeering at the aged scribe. Jeme had once told her how loafers in the market liked to start riots out of little disputes so that they could smash and loot stalls in the confusion.
A sudden hush descended. Standing on tiptoe Jelindel could see three market constables pushing their way through the crowd. They were burly giants with stubby spikes on their shoulder armour and spired helmets jammed down over their wild hair.
The market constables were recruited for size, strength and – some said – for ugly faces. They shoulder -ed the onlookers aside, kicking at those who were too slow, then lined up before the two disputants.
‘Settle your differences in good order,’ bellowed the ranking constable.
‘Ah, uh, five coppers I think the gentleman requires to be returned,’ the scribe mumbled.
‘Nine!’ the petitioner insisted. ‘For defective work.’
‘Pay him six,’ ordered the constable, ‘and pay us six – each!’
The scribe quickly counted out twenty-four coppers into four piles. The petitioner snatched up his coins, bowed to the constables, and backed into the crowd.
‘You are the cause of this disturbance,’ the ranking constable snarled at the scribe as he scooped up the remaining coins. ‘Consider yourself lucky,
and take more care henceforth.’
With his free hand he seized the edge of the scribe’s stall and wrenched it over, scattering his quills and spilling inks and powders onto the dusty ground of the market. The scribe bowed and thanked the constables for their diligence, then knelt down and began to gather up his scattered possessions. The market constables set about breaking up the crowd that had been watching. Unruly mobs were not tolerated by the market’s trustees. They were bad for business.
Jelindel was quick to sense an opportunity. Good scribes were apparently in short supply but in high demand. She skirted the market constables and quickly caught up with the angry petitioner.
‘Please, goodman,’ she panted as she caught up. ‘How much you pay for writing petition?’
‘Can yer write, boy?’ he asked, staring down at what he thought to be a grubby youth in stable roughweaves.
‘Better write than speak,’ Jelindel said confidently. It was damnably hard to know if she was going too far with slang in her native Skeltian, but playing a Nerrissian trying to speak Skeltian was easy. ‘Five coppers, is all,’ she added hopefully.
The man considered her words carefully. ‘Yeah, but only if yer come with me when I present it, yer hear?’
Jelindel nodded acknowledgement.
‘And yer name?’ the navvy enquired gruffly.
‘Jel-Jaelin,’ she faltered. From now on I’m JAELIN! she silently screamed to herself.
The navvy sensed deceit but said nothing. Everyone working the market had something to hide, and street urchins rarely spoke a true word. He put a hand down to his purse as Jelindel led him aside to a pen where wholesale beer was auctioned. She had a writing kit in her bag. She had taken it with her the night before to write down what she saw in the star-drenched sky of the eclipse. Now it was practically all she had left in the world. Uncorking a phial of ink, she spread out a sheet of reedbond on the top of a barrel and wrote out the man’s petition as he spoke it.