by John Conroe
“Some shady folks watching the western and northern gates. It’s going to be damned cold tonight,” Jella said, looking up at the clear sky as she sat cross-legged on the ground.
“I’ll leave the window unlatched if either of you decide you want a warm room,” I said. Jella would never ask for that and would never admit that sleeping outside was any discomfort at all, but I knew my teacher too well.
“Perhaps,” she allowed, picking the chicken up and eating it off the bone with her fingers.
“Alright then. Goodnight.”
“Savid,” she said as I turned away.
“Yeah?”
“They’ll come for us tomorrow. By then, I imagine all four gates will have watchers.”
“I should hope so. It’ll spread them out a bit.”
Chapter 32
They hit us as we approached the western gate early the next morning. It was the most likely exit for us to leave the town and it opened right onto the King’s Highway, which we would take north, and I didn’t want to disappoint.
Cort rode beside me, puffing a fat cigar with a smile on his face. If you ever meet a Recon trooper and they smell like cigar, they’re probably a sapper. Just saying. Trell and Kassa rode in the wagon, the young eslling actually driving it. Turns out she had plenty of experience with wagons as a child and teenager. Three cloaked and hooded forms sat upright in the back of the wagon, along with our other bags and gear. Drew followed behind on his black gelding.
Six men were clustered around the gate, not a one of them wearing a guard’s uniform. At least three others were loitering to our sides, two on the left, one on the right. We were eight or nine spans from the gate when the sounds of heavy crossbow bolts hitting cloth and leather came from the wagon bed.
We didn’t look back, instead kicking our horses forward, attacking into the ambush. The snipers above us would be left in the hands of others. Cort threw a round, smoking ball at the six by the gate while I lifted my cocked crossbow and triggered my own bolt into the same group. Behind me, I heard the twang of Drew’s crossbow as well as one from the wagon, but I was mostly focused on charging the remaining men in front of me, releasing the crossbow to drop on its saddle lanyard. My axes slipped free from the saddle mounts as Tipton snorted and lowered his head.
Cort’s smoker started to gush a thick stream of black smoke all around the feet of my targets, causing more than a little panic. Then I was right in the middle of them, my horse knocking one off his feet, my left axe chopping into the sword arm of another. A third attempted to spear my horse but Tipton was wearing his chest armor, a thick plate of leather studded with metal rivets, and the point skidded off. Wearing his armor always puts Tipton into battle mode and this time was no different. He rode over the spearman, deliberately stamping his feet as he went. I turned the big horse back to the battle in time to see Drew ride up and jab his own spear into the back of the last man standing, who was trading sword strikes with Cort amidst the thick clouds of smelly smoke. The rest of our would-be attackers were down, either wounded or dead.
The wagon approached, Trell and Kassa looking a bit wide-eyed but unharmed. The cloaked forms behind them still remained upright despite several heavy bolts jutting from each of them. Back on the street, people were starting to poke heads out of windows and doors, but the sight of several arrow-shot bodies on the street and at least one that hung over the arm of a shop sign kept them inside. Soshi and Jella stood upright atop two different buildings, Jella’s position just above the sign decorator.
“Let’s egress out of here before any backup arrives,” I said. Drew headed through the gate, the wagon rumbling after him while Cort and I waited with the reins of two horses. Moments later, Jella and Soshi trotted up, mounted their horses, and passed through the gates.
About five t-spans out of town, we stopped the wagon and pulled away the heavy canvas covering the bed. Our three prisoners lay bound and gagged, looking at us with crazy eyes. Then they spotted the three arrow-ridden lumps that had stood in for them. The secretary, Kultin, started to shake uncontrollably while Andru glowered and Kazilionum just shuddered and closed his eyes.
We pulled the cloaks off the three water barrels and let the prisoners up, but that was all the time we spared as I ordered the team to move out.
We camped that night, stayed in a pretty nice inn the next, camped out again the third, and finally took shelter during a snowstorm in a seedy little place in Frank’s Pass. It was grungy, rundown, and smelled like a pigsty, but it was warm, and the stable was decent. As the main inn was mostly full of travelers due the sudden storm, we opted to stay in the stable with the horses, the smell of manure an actual improvement over the odors of the main barroom. It beat a rough bivouac in sleet and snow, but the innkeeper still gouged us full room costs. We were on the road early the next day, and it was slow going in the third of a span of snow that had fallen. The roads were much clearer when we descended out the mountain pass and we made good time, arriving in Haven just after dark.
We headed straight to Havensheart to secure our prisoners in the king’s cells and for me to report.
We were held up at the castle gates until two squads of guardsmen arrived in full battle gear.
“Captain DelaCrotia, I’ve been ordered to escort you to the king,” the lieutenant in charge said. I recognized him.
“Shouldn’t you escort my prisoners, Lieutenant Berill?” I asked.
“Sergeant Hirsch will handle them, sir, and your people will need to disperse back to their homes,” he said, somehow apologetic and steel firm at the same time.
“The prisoners require special handling, Lieutenant. Two of them are very dangerous,” I warned.
“Yes, sir. If you would delegate one person to accompany Sergeant Hirsch, they can advise him.”
“Drew,” I said, getting an immediate nod.
The three prisoners were transferred to a two-wheeled cart pulled by a single horse, surrounded by one of the two squads, and trotted off in a fast, efficient manner with Drew riding alongside. Jella, Trell, Kassa, Soshi, and Cort all caught my eyes and, at my nod, turned for the Knife and Needle.
“This way, sir,” the lieutenant said, his men forming up around me in what was definitely not an honor guard.
“What’s happened while I was away, Lieutenant?”
“Not for me to say, sir,” he said with something like honest regret. “His Majesty was very clear about that.”
With that verbal club weighing on us, we stayed silent as they marched me into a side door in the castle and down some of the back hallways near the royal offices. We came to a large waiting room that I recognized as one designated for petitioners of the court and waited for fifteen minutes until Colonel Erser, himself, opened the doors to the king’s court.
The long space was almost completely empty and while the big wall-mounted oil sconces tried heroically to light the space, shadows lined the walls and filled the corners with gloom.
King Warcan waited on his throne, Brona at his right hand, Neil Slinch at his left. The better part of another squad of guards stood on either side of the space in front of him, clearly a barrier to my approach as I was marched up in front of the dais.
I dropped to one knee as appropriate and bowed my head.
“You have apparently cleared one of your missions in record time, Savid,” the king said, his voice almost relaxed. I wasn’t fooled.
“It unfolded with uncharacteristic speed, Your Majesty,” I said, raising my head.
“A plot involving Nuks, eslling-tainted artifacts, and a traitorous mayor. It sounds like a bard’s tale,” he said, his tone changing to mild disbelief. He looked odd, almost manic. At his side, Neil’s face was blank, yet he had a gleam in his eye that set the hair on my neck upright. Brona’s face was a careful mask as well, but her body betrayed a tension that she seldom, if ever, exhibited when by her father’s side.
“The fantastic nature of the situation was not lost on me, Sire. So I brought the N
uk, the creator of the artifacts, and the mayor’s secretary back for you to question, Your Majesty,” I said.
He raised both eyebrows at that, glancing aside at Slinch with an unreadable expression that might have been annoyance. “That was… thorough of you,” he said, looking from me to Lieutenant Berill.
“The prisoners have been escorted to the castle’s jail, Your Majesty. Captain DelaCrotia advised that two of them require special handling, so one of his people is advising to their security,” the young officer reported from a position of ramrod attention.
“I see. Good work, Lieutenant. We will see to their questioning tomorrow,” King Helat said, his eyes returning to me. “Tonight, we have other topics to discuss.” His tone had gone slightly ominous.
I waited, eyes on the king while he studied me.
“It has been an interesting time since you left, Savid,” he finally said. “At my command, Colonel Erser secured both the Grantells and your own family within their manors. The Ravens handled the testing of every member of both households. Your extremely risky technique for finding the traitor worked. A shaper was revealed during the urmak tests,” he said, pausing for effect. “It was your brother… Tallen.”
I was honestly surprised. I had been pretty sure it was one of the Grantells. To hear that Tallen had somehow become an agent for the Paul, one with shaper talent at that, was frankly the last thing I expected.
The king was watching me closely and his eyebrows went up in silent question. I had to answer in some way.
“That’s… unexpected, Sire,” I finally said, trying to wrap my head around the news. My brother Tallen had always been a bit of a twit, annoying and condescending. He had received training with weapons as we all had but had no natural talent for it nor the will to work hard at it. Sarcastic and smarmy, he was nonetheless always the least threatening of my two brothers. In order for him to be a shaper agent, he would have had to be infected by the Paul’s priests.
“What has he said, Sire? Has he explained why and how?” I asked.
King Helat was staring through me, clearly looking for some reaction on my part. Instead of answering my questions, he turned and looked off to my left side. A man stepped forward, out of the gloom. I recognized him after a moment. Carter Toothaker, the king’s rook. He was never seen in public, and very seldom visible even in the castle. Toothaker was King Helat’s attack dog, his personal weapon in the night. Remover of dissidents, investigator, fixer, assassin, and rumored potential eslling. In all my years with the royal family, I’ve seen Toothaker exactly twice, both times in the halls of the castle, both times coming from the king’s chambers. Even Brona had only met the man a handful of times. He was perhaps even more shadowy than my Shadows.
Tall and whipcord thin, he had straw-colored hair, cut very short, and eyes so light blue that they appeared to be almost like glacial ice. He looked to be of the same age as my father, yet he was clearly a much more dangerous man than dear old chubby dad. Both times I had seen him, he had been expressionless, his cold eyes empty of humanity, like the gaze of a death rattler. Now, as then, he wore a completely blank mask as he looked from me to King Helat. I almost missed his pronouncement, almost turned my head to look back at the king. Something made me stop my glance away and, in that moment, I saw the smallest shake of his head, so minute a movement that I was still trying to decide if it was real when the king spoke.
“You were blasé about your family before you left. You appear surprised now,” the king commented.
“Tallen has never, to my knowledge, shown the slightest ambition, the sightest dissatis…” I trailed off, remembering his words at Ircian’s Naming.
“Turns out that he was not, in fact, content with his lot in life,” King Helat said, ignoring my pause. “It would seem that playing third to your father and oldest brother is, according to him, a form of unrelenting torture.”
“But, Sire, to join the Paul?” I asked. “I could possibly see him assassinate Gracid and maybe even my father, but betray the kingdom?”
“You may be shocked to hear this, Savid, but most citizens do not share your degree of patriotism,” the king said.
I looked at the two squads of guards surrounding me, then glanced at where Toothaker stood in the shadows. “You thought I might be in on it? Your Majesty,” I added hastily.
“You were not the only person surprised by this revelation, Savid. It has been suggested that if Tallen was a traitor, why not his younger brother?”
“But there is almost no one in the kingdom the Paul hates more than myself, Sire,” I said.
“With the exception of myself and Brona, that would seem to be true. But what a cover it would make, right?”
He never looked at Slinch, but by his stiffness, I knew Neil was the one planting those thoughts in the king’s ear.
“I cost the Paul thousands of woldlings,” I said.
“He cares nothing about cost, either in coin or lives, Savid,” Helat said. “You know this.”
“May I see him?” I asked.
“I think not,” the king said. “Not so much out of a concern for your behavior, Savid, but it seems your brother harbors almost as much ill will for you as he does Rucian and Gracid. Had you enjoyed an unremarkable military career and retired into an obscure life running an inn, it might have been different. Instead, you outshone the rest of your family and live an exciting life outside the constraints of your father. He is, to say the least, extremely jealous of you. He was injured during his capture and Doctor Eltienne wants him kept quiet in between the rigors of his questioning.”
I nodded at his words, then took another glance around me. None of the soldiers had relaxed even a little.
“There is, perhaps, more, Sire?” I asked.
He smiled a cold smile and glanced at Slinch as if to say, See, he’s not stupid.
“Yes. You’ve been careless with the property of the crown, Savid. I can’t abide that,” the king said.
“I have, Your Majesty?”
“The woldling prisoner has escaped. You failed to properly secure him.”
“Ash?” I asked stupidly.
“In your absence, upon the recommendation of Neil’s observer, I commanded that the woldling be turned over to the Ravens for debriefing. Yet he was missing when agent Fontina arrived at your facility to secure him.”
Fontina must have had some way of backtracking to our cells, a Finder’s stone or similar object she was able to leave behind. Ash would have sensed them coming for him, upstairs in the safehouse above the holding cells.
“And this happened recently, Sire?”
“The day after you left. I’m told there was no sign that the creature had ever been returned to his cell. I am extremely disappointed in you, Savid. Carelessness with my property is unforgivable.”
I had to throttle down all of my reactions. To claim a damaged soldier as his personal property was in my mind even more unforgiveable, yet he was waiting for a reaction, an outburst, clearly prepared with an overwhelming number of soldiers as well as his pet assassin waiting in the wings.
“Did you want me to attempt to retrieve Ash, Your Majesty, or am I bound for the executioner’s block?”
He frowned, his face going a little red. Beside him, Brona had gone as white as a sheet, her eyes imploring me to shut my mouth.
“You are bound for a cell, Savid,” he said with a tiny nod. The sound of a bolter hissing hit my ears as something stung my neck. Instantly my vision began to go dark, but I still heard his final words: “Perhaps you’ll see your brother after all,” before it all faded to black.
Chapter 33
Drip. Drip. Drip.
I awoke in darkness, my stomach an instant knot of cramps. Indigo eel venom. The symptoms were obvious even though this was my first time observing them from a direct, personal exposure. Our favorite knockout agent for bolter darts. Apparently the Ravens’ favorite too.
Cold hard rock laid under my left side but compared to the cramps, it wa
s barely a bother.
Drip. Drip. Drip.
Let’s see… darkness, dripping water, cold stone floor, leftover knockout symptoms. I was in the dungeons, deep under the castle, a place I had often visited but never as a guest.
Another bout of cramps hit, my breath whistling from my lungs as I tried to pant my way through them. I recalled that women drugged with Indigo venom hardly ever complained about the side effects, but men tended to go on and on about the pain. Weaker sex indeed.
The pain passed and my stomach muscles unclenched gradually, slowly. Sometime later, maybe five minutes, maybe ten, I felt good enough to push myself upright, discovering as I turned that the darkness wasn’t as complete as I thought. Flickering orange light shone through the small barred aperture set in the massive cell door. Hmm, not just any cells but maximum security, I noted. Tightly set stone blocks, each somewhere between one and two tons, made up the walls, the gaps so small, a doctor’s surgical blade wouldn’t fit between them.
The floor was hewn rock and there was no window other than the square opening in the door, half a hand wide and the same tall. The door itself was iron-bound oak, thicker than my forearm, and I knew there was a metal plate that swung over the viewport, yet it must have been left open for me to see torchlight.
There was no cot, just a solid bench of hewn stone, a little shorter than I was tall and a little narrower than the width of my chest. No blanket, no containers for water or waste, just a narrow trough cut into the stone of the floor leading to a small square opening in the wall that I would have trouble putting two fingers into. The whole room stunk of urine, feces, and vomit.
After a few moments sitting upright, I tried standing, discovering that my legs were still holding onto the effects of the toxin, refusing to answer to my brain and almost dumping me onto the floor again.
“Aye, yer awake then,” a gravelly voice said at the door grate, the outline of a head blocking most of the torchlight. “He’ll want to know, he will.”
The head disappeared and the sound of booted feet moved off, the cell brightening a bit.