by White, Gwynn
Guy had never sworn fealty to anyone. He wore no tattoos at all—well, not counting the dragon waving an Overwhelm banner that had turned up on his arse after his birthday party last year …
“All right, then,” he said. “There’s only one thing for it. A trial by combat.”
Pirs stared at him. “Now you’re being ridiculous. I haven’t picked up a sword in years, apart from coaching Ran.”
“I didn’t mean you should fight! I’ll champion you.” He liked the idea more as he spoke. “I’ll bury whoever Uncle Tristan sees fit to send against me.”
A softness came into Pirs’s eyes. “Guy, I believe you would. But I won’t let you. So let’s stop talking about it.”
Stung by the crisp rebuff, Guy snarled, “Then you’ll die in here.”
“I will not. I want a trial by ordeal.”
“No.”
“Yes. We can’t force him to call Parliament, but he can’t refuse me a trial as such. I have to prove my innocence in front of the whole country. The slur on our House’s integrity has to be removed.” Piers’s eyes shone feverishly. “I want you to put it to him in front of as many people as possible. He’ll be trapped, no way out; he won’t be able to refuse!”
“It’s too risky! What if you’re proved guilty?”
“Don’t you believe I’m innocent?”
“Saints, how can you even—”
“There, you see? God knows it, too, and He will prove it in front of the whole nation. I’m not in the least worried about that.”
Guy pinched the bridge of his nose until his vision blurred. “You mean … bribe the priest in charge?” he said hopefully.
“No; it has to be one hundred percent aboveboard. Anyway, why should I have to cheat?” Piers thrust his right arm towards the roof. “This is all I need.”
Guy winced. He understood the reference all too well. They had both witnessed trials by ordeal in rural Ireland. The usual format was that the defendant, vaunting and swearing terribly, seven-eighths drunk on poteen, would plunge his right arm into a cauldron of boiling water.
If a man burned, he was guilty.
Burns could be healed, but there was no saint on earth who could heal a severed neck.
“You can tell Mother,” Guy said with forced jocularity.
“As if she cares what becomes of me,” Piers said flatly. “It’s up to you and me now.”
13
Vivienne
At The Same Time
Five o’clock.
Five thirty.
Five fifty.
Vivienne flicked her cigarette into a modern sculpture and headed for the door. The dancefloor was crowded now, the rock singer sweating and posturing atop the altar, the young people doing their grotesque jigging pair-dance.
She went straight home to the Isle of Dogs. A Sauvage possession for centuries, the Isle had originally been chosen for its defensibility, as it was bounded on three sides by the Thames and on the other side by undeveloped tidal marshes. A private boat carried her to the pier, and a car took her up to the frumpy old mansion. Her sons kept half a dozen dragons in the mews here. The broken-hearted screeching of Piers’s favorite beast followed her upstairs to her bedchamber. She drew the curtains on the remains of the day and threw herself down on her bed, arms limply flung over her head, eyes open.
Over the fireplace a broadsword hung on brackets. It had been laid in the middle of this very bed between her and Wills on their wedding night. They had had to wait in the dark, awkwardly holding fingertips, until a gang of Sauvage knights costumed as knobkiach—mythical creatures with horse-heads and seaweed manes—burst whooping into the room, lifted the sword, and used it to cut Vivienne’s nightdress off.
How they had all laughed.
She rolled onto her stomach, clutching the pillows. She could stop herself from crying, but she could not stop herself from remembering ...
The Past. June 1962
“Darling.”
“Pass the joint, Wills, you’re hogging it.”
“Darling, you ought to read this. It’s quite fascinating.”
She propped herself up. “You aren’t—yes, you actually are reading a book. Are you quite well?” She pretended to feel William’s forehead.
Laughing, he leaned over her to reach the ashtray, which was the hollowed-out, plastinated head of a yeti he had shot in Russia. “Don’t be too shocked.” He showed her the cover of his book. It was Volume III of that ghastly multi-volume tome by “Anonymous,” The Chronicles of the Worldcracker.
“Fetch my smelling salts,” she said, pretending to fan herself.
“It’s very interesting, actually.”
“Wills, I never want to hear anything about that sword again. I don’t believe it even exists! It’s a myth. Our friends died for a myth.”
Wills took her hand. “What is history, if not true myth?”
“That’s straight out of that book.”
“Yes. But it’s not all like that. Anonymous seems to have done his research. He says the Worldcracker was made in Germany in the Middle Ages. The Saxon Lords brought it here when they first conquered Great Britain; then it was captured by the Irish and held by them for several hundred years. That’s his case for restoring the MacConn dynasty. He sort of glosses over the last two centuries.”
Subsequent to the fall of House MacConn, the throne of Great Britain and Ireland had passed to House Stuart and then (briefly) House Sauvage before settling in the hands of House Wessex forty years ago. That event had coincided with the explosion of scientific innovation triggered by the breakup of the Church. Since then, the state had expanded tremendously on the back of technological progress—and the Wessex Corporation had expanded with it, to the point that further regime change was well-nigh unthinkable. The Wessexes and their armies of bondsknights, bonded employees, and affiliated lesser Houses were simply too tightly bound into the fabric of the modern state. They held monopolies on the railways and hydroelectrical power generation, as well as the national telephone utility. But the Sauvage Corporation held the monopolies on oil and gas, so Vivienne felt that things were equitable enough.
“Anonymous doesn’t explain,” Wills said thoughtfully, tapping the book, “why Harold was able to use the Worldcracker to commit genocide and geological rearrangement of Russia, when none of his precious MacConns ever did anything like that.”
“Wills, Anonymous is anonymous for a reason: he’s a crackpot.”
“Even a broken clock … No, but there is quite a lot of evidence that the Worldcracker does … still … exist, somewhere. Darling, I don’t expect you to take me seriously; I don’t quite take it seriously myself—but I think I may have traced it.”
“So,” she said calmly, “are you following in Tristan’s footsteps? Shall we search for a medium? Shall we call our friends—and ring the IRA, too, and tell them to lay on a bomb?”
She was being irrational and she knew it. Wills pulled her into his arms and stroked her hair. He had grown into a giant of a man, resembling his father in his prime, to the point that people jokingly called him Harold the Second—but where Harold had carried a magical sword and won the Great War, Wills carried a jewelled one and won tourneys. Vivienne cherished the present. She feared the past like a mad relation.
Wills’s voice vibrated through her. “He’s a mad sod, old Stannie! But you’re here with me now, darling. You’re safe.”
“And you aren’t going to mention the—the sword—ever again,” she reconfirmed.
“I’ve one lead I did particularly want to follow up. But of course, your wish is my command.”
“Wills.” Aware that it was she who held the balance of power in their marriage, she was always careful not to ride roughshod over his wishes. “What sort of lead?”
“Oh, just a clue that the sword might be …”
“Where?”
“Somewhere on the Riviera.”
She burst out laughing, hit him on the chest with loosely curled fists, and sat
back on her heels, shaking her head. “Damn you. You know perfectly well that the Riviera is the place I love most in the entire world.”
“I had to think of some way to make you take a holiday.”
Niall Sauvage was still going strong, but Vivienne knew that someday in the not-too-distant future she would have to take over from him, and then there would be no more time for holidays. So they left Piers, who was eighteen months old, and went driving through the southern provinces of Germany. They danced in village squares and camped beneath the stars. Vivienne spent long days painting ruins, while Wills foraged in the antiques markets. It was just the two of them and a pair of bodyguards who were actually tourney chums of Wills’s. The Second World War had been over for years. Television had been invented, and transistors. The Germans were digging mountains of resources out of the Middle Eastern former territories of the Russian Empire. The world was at peace.
On the other side of the Pyrenees, the Spanish old guard seethed over the new king’s abolition of slavery. In another year Spain would explode. But Vivienne and Wills had not an inkling of that, as they crossed the Pyrenees and camped in the open, no other living thing to be seen for miles save the birds circling the fangs of the ruins, nothing to be heard but the clonk of goat bells, and no weapons on them save Vivienne’s little pearl-handled pistol and Wills’s tourney sword.
Four Months Later. September 1962. Catalonia
The floor of the cave shook. Out on the mountainside, the Greenteeth were firing vintage rocket grenade launchers. Vivienne hoped they blew up in their faces. Shards of rock fell from the cave’s ceiling, striking the pallet she’d pulled over her back. She crouched on the floor, protecting Nylf’s two-month-old son. Nylf was gone—she’d been fetching water from the stream when the helicopter roared over the mountaintop.
The chief Greentooth had chased the women into the cave, snarling that he’d shoot them all before he let them be taken.
The Greenteeth were runaway slaves, one of the gangs of bandits that operated martyr factories in the mountains of northern Spain—a phenomenon that Vivienne and Wills had been completely unaware of. The women were their assets, meant to give birth to babies whose little bodies could be sold to magicians for black relics.
The Greenteeth had kidnapped Vivienne in a rickety motorboat from a Catalan beach, while Wills and their bodyguards stood by helplessly.
The chief Greentooth squatted at the front of the cave, frantically changing the magazine of his rifle.
In between the explosions, Vivienne thought she could hear someone shouting, but maybe it was just the roar of hope in her ears.
Loud cracks burst from the roof, and dust drifted down, slow and heavy. Sebkep rose, choking, hugging her own baby. “The roof’s collapsing! We have to get out!”
“No,” Vivienne screamed. “They’re firing into the cave, you fool! Get down!” But before she finished speaking, Sebkep fell, twisting to cushion her baby’s fall with her own body. Vivienne snatched the newborn out of Sebkep’s arms. She dragged self and pallet and both infants deeper into the dogleg corner at the back of the cave.
Wills, she screamed silently. Wills, here I am!
She didn’t see the chief Greentooth die, sniped through the head. She didn’t see the rest of the Greenteeth mown down as they ran. She didn’t see the Sea Dragon helicopter land on the ledge below the cave, and the assault team hit the ground sprinting, hopscotching uphill through the scrub. The first she saw or heard of them was a loudhailer booming in Spanish, ordering the survivors to stay calm.
Wills?
Hugging the babies to her chest, she peeped around the corner.
Assault troops dashed into the cave, trampling bedding and cookware and the smashed pieces of the fiddle that Nylf had made from rabbit guts and pieces of a crate. The surviving women cowered, pleading in several different languages to be spared.
Wills!
After months of slowly accepting that he wouldn’t come for her, she now believed he had.
Until she saw that the helmeted man approaching her was shorter, narrower in the shoulders. In fact he was …
Lightheaded, she handed the babies off to someone else.
“Stannie.”
“Viv. Good to see you in one piece. I’d have had to cover the costs of this excursion myself, if it were only to bring back your relics.”
Tristan pulled off his helmet. Lean, fit, tanned so deeply that the burn scars on his cheeks were hardly visible, he had dust in his eyebrows and a wide grin. He was a captain in the ROCK; these were his men.
“Where’s Wills?” she said stupidly.
“You weren’t counting on him to rescue you, were you?” Tristan looked around at the terrified women and crying babies. “Good God. Any other hidey-holes like this?”
“Yes. There are another couple of caves higher up where they keep—kept—their munitions and things. But I don’t think there are any captives up there.”
Tristan lifted his helmet and spoke into its built-in radio. “Secure the caves higher up. Watch out for hostiles.” He swung back to Vivienne. “Do any of these girls know who you are?”
“Of course they do. That’s Marta, that’s Antonia … there are babies here, Tristan.”
“This is a black op. The Spanish don’t know we’re here. It will be rather embarrassing if we get caught.”
“Then why are we standing here? We can fit them all in the helicopter, can’t we?”
Tristan exchanged a few words with his lieutenant, then put his arm around her shoulders. He led her out of the cave and down the slope at a run, warning her about sharp rocks that awaited her bare feet, as if she hadn’t been trudging up and down this mountainside with buckets of water for the last four months. The ROCK knights had spread out around the helicopter, lying flat amid the scrub, their rifles trained on the valley approaches. Tristan vaulted into the helicopter and pulled her up. The craft stank of aviation fuel. He put a blanket around her shoulders, which she threw back at him. It was hot.
Crouching by the door of the chopper, she could see the body of a Greentooth with both legs blown off. She was glad to be rescued, of course, but revenge came too late to do her any good.
Shots came from the direction of the cave.
Tristan popped the top off a bottle of N-Rgy with his teeth and handed it to her. “Wills is waiting in Barcelona.”
“Then I’d rather like to go to him. I’ve spent far too long here as it is.”
“Oh, there’s no hurry. If we get caught, we can always say we came early for the war.”
“War? What war?”
“King Carlos versus his own nobles. It’s going to be dirty. I expect we shall have to get involved sooner or later. He is my second cousin, after all, or is it third?”
Vivienne looked up the mountainside and saw the mouth of the cave where she had been held captive for so long, a black hole framed by rocks that glittered with mica. The sky was so blue it hurt.
“Your father wasn’t particularly bothered about rescuing you,” Tristan informed her.
Her teeth chattered on the rim of the N-Rgy bottle. “For some reason I’m less than surprised. He would prefer Sophia to inherit. He thinks she’s got more belly. But he’s wrong. I’ll make him proud.”
“Well, I’m not like him, that’s my point. I don’t hold grudges. Look at me. I came to rescue you, didn’t I?”
“… Yes.”
Tristan’s dark brown eyes sparkled. “So now can we talk?”
“No. No, we cannot.”
“Oh, Viv. Come on.”
“No!” she shouted. Her stomach griped. She fell on her hands and knees and vomited out of the door of the helicopter. The energy drink tasted just as sickly sweet on the way back up. Tristan handed her a towel striped with engine grease. She wiped her lips.
“I know what you’re hiding, Viv.”
“You know nothing.”
“That fiend—”
“Don’t talk about it!”
&nbs
p; “—the fiend I accidentally summoned said that someone in that crypt was deceiving me. One of those people knew where the Worldcracker was. It had to be you.”
“Why would you think that?”
“No one else’s father was at Moscow with Harold! Niall Sauvage fought through a river of blood at Harold’s side. He was there when Harold slew the Tsar in the bowels of the Imperial Palace. He has to be the one who took the Worldcracker!”
“No one took it.” Her voice gave her away. It sounded high and thin. “Your father just lost it.”
“Come on, Viv. Niall took it, he’s still got it, and he’s told you where it is.”
Tristan had guessed the truth.
While Wills scoured Spain for the Worldcracker, Vivienne had known all along exactly where it was. She had put him and herself through this because of a promise made to her father.
Tristan had guessed the truth … but not all of it.
“He didn’t take it,” she exclaimed, unable to bear that the Earl of Dublin should be thought a common thief. “Your father gave it to him. It was at the very end, there in the Imperial Palace, with a mountain range of corpses behind them and the earth belching madness. Your father had killed sixty million people and I suppose it was starting to sink in. He said, ‘Take this from me, Niall. Take it and get rid of it. Let this never happen again as long as the world shall turn.’ And he gave him the Worldcracker and—and Father got rid of it.”
“No, he didn’t,” Tristan said, taking her revelation calmly. “Niall Sauvage would never get rid of the most powerful weapon in the world. He hid it. And you know where, Viv, don’t you?”
“I’m not telling you another thing.”
“Father’s dying. He’s got something wrong with his bowels. He’s wasting away and he won’t pray to the saints. He says he wants to go to Mother. I will be king before the year is out.”
“I’m sorry.”