He had just nocked the bolt onto the string when it dawned on him that at least one of these objectives had been an abject failure. The oppressive silence of the glade was suddenly broken by the crying of seabirds overhead. Looking up from his task, Gudric saw that it was still night, but the clouds had vanished and in the pale light of the full moon he could make out an expanse of treeless, heather-clad terrain rolling down to a rocky shoreline, some three kilometres away. There were some cottages and farmsteads, although their rugged stone walls and turf roofs made them all but blend into the terrain in the semi-darkness. Gudric, though, did not require a stronger light to recognise a prospect he had seen most days of his life, only excepting those days since he had been press-ganged and sent to war. The isle of Strygholm held few happy memories for him, but it was the only home he had ever known and one which he had increasingly grown to miss the further they had sailed away from it, and into this godforsaken wilderness at the edge of the known world.
He did not care to cite homesickness as any sort of defence, however. Asleep on my watch, then. Well, ain’t that just fucking great? That’s really going to make Cædmon start taking me seriously, he thought, and wondered if they would go to the trouble of flogging him or just leave it to Colgrim to lash his dignity to shreds with gleeful taunts. Not while I live and breathe, he resolved, and began pinching himself, but the real world remained stubbornly elusive. He then tried pricking his hands with the tip of a crossbow bolt which, while certainly painful, had no more promising an effect. While he was staring in frustration at his bloodied fingertips, he heard a high-pitched sound from behind him, not entirely dissimilar to the seabirds but nearer, more grating, and uncomfortably familiar. In spite of the obvious folly of it, he could not resist taking a more determined stance with his crossbow, holding it ready for action, before he turned to face the source of the noise.
In the opposite direction, he could make out the looming silhouette of the eorl’s castle to the right, the squat profile of his mother’s old cottage to the left, and standing between them, although much closer to him, was a figure that made his skin crawl with his grey uniform; his gold runes; his small, piggy eyes; and a cruel, contemptuous smirk that lent his stare an even more unfavourable cast. That bastard officer again. Gudric blinked a few times, but the loathsome, giggling spectre was going nowhere in a hurry, so he decided to ignore it and went back to his self-harming. He disliked the fact that the memory of the worthless wretch was still haunting him so long after the events of that fateful day, but it was a great comfort to know that this was certainly of no comfort at all to the real-life ex-officer, who was probably cleaning the shit out of some lofdreki’s bilge tank right at this moment. That thought did a lot for Gudric’s morale, but sadly nothing whatsoever for his wakefulness, and his frustration quickly mounted again.
“Hey! Little Gudric,” whispered the interloper, in Colgrim’s voice. “Having trouble there? You want maybe I should run a ploughshare over your hand? Might be funnier than the one that mangled your old mam.” Unthinkingly, Gudric swung the crossbow around and loosed the bolt with surprising accuracy for an angry, impulsive, from-the-hip shot, although he had less than half a second to marvel at his own marksmanship. As the bolt sailed through the figure, he had the briefest, almost subliminal impression of something else standing in its place: something dark, elongated, and spindly, like the stretched shadow of a man, although subtly malformed in ways that mere length could not account for. The disturbing hallucination was mercifully fleeting, cut short as the bolt thudded into a solid surface, and the whole scene suddenly cleared. Gudric could see the glade again, its ruins as eerie as ever but absent of any intruders, and less than ten metres away he could see the fletchings of his crossbow bolt. It had struck a sapling that had taken root on one of the old foundations, splitting its thin trunk clean down the middle, and was all too visible even in the gloom. Come daybreak, it would be a blatant talking-point. In Gudric’s mind, he could clearly hear Colgrim’s sarcastic effusions of gratitude for having saved them all from the deadly baby tree, to say nothing of Cædmon’s well-meant, patronising sympathy that would only make him feel even more like the nervous, unstable rookie they all seemed to think him.
Balls to that, he decided, looking around to ascertain that he was truly alone. There were no sounds except of snoring from the tents, and nothing whatsoever from the surrounding jungle, save for innocuous rustlings. Just to be on the safe side, he took out his pulley cord, drew the bowstring back again, and nocked a second bolt in a matter of seconds. Getting really good at this now, if I can just learn to shoot at targets that are really there, he thought, with both genuine and ironic pride, as he set off to reclaim his misspent bolt. He did not remember the perimeter of Alvere sigils until he was several steps beyond them, by which time the back of his neck had begun to itch again, and was rapidly getting worse, mild prickling giving way to a keen, localised burning sensation. Before he had time to reconsider his plans, that had become an acute and overpowering agony, as if some assassin was drilling a cold, needle-sharp dagger into his spine. Fighting the pain, he summoned enough willpower to swing around and shoot his second bolt, more clumsily than before, but it made no difference: there was no target to shoot at. The pain did stop, but only momentarily, and before he could recover his wits enough to make a break for the perimeter, the back of his neck exploded in torment again.
Gudric tried reaching for the seax at his belt, desperately hoping that if he flailed it around he might eventually manage to wound something, but his hand never even made it. The strength was deserting his limbs at such a rate that even if he could have fought the pain again, he knew that he would never make it back to the safe zone, although he tried. Near-superhuman efforts managed to carry him forward a few wretched centimetres before his legs ground to a complete halt, and his arms dangled uselessly at his sides, with no more power than a dead man’s. The thought that he might indeed be dying was, by this point, a minor solace, but one that failed him: for if he had been dying, he could have expected his senses to have faded as well as his strength, but they was doing no such thing. Instead, he now saw and felt with hideous clarity as a squadron of deformed, emaciated shadows crowded in on him, penetrated his flesh with their icy claws, and twisted and broke him as easily and as mercilessly as if he had been a stick effigy. Make it stop, he thought, repeatedly, but to no avail.
CHAPTER SEVEN – DIPLOMATIC VULNERABILITY
Against all probabilities, the morning had at first gone rather well for Secretary Kasimir. He had slept soundly, breakfasted surprisingly well on wild mushrooms and alerion eggs, and had taken an escorted visit to the Lucinian embassy where the staff were being held under house arrest. The embassy quarter had been mostly unscathed in the battle, and he found the ambassador and his staff in good health, if hardly in good spirits. Still, it allowed his first report back home to be generally positive, and making that report proved easier than he had dared to hope, as the harmonic telegraph was still operational. He had not only feared that the line might have been severed during the bombardment, but also that the embassy apparatus would be some clapped-out antique that had not been upgraded since Alvenheim’s Writ of Independence, thus forcing him and Maradith to spend a long and tedious morning hunched over the Kyttsen Codebook typing out dots and dashes in VK-Binary. In contrast, being able to actually hear a voice from the metropolis – even that of some pompous senatorial undersecretary in scratchy quality – was almost a pleasant diversion. With nearly two hours to go before his audience with the Queen, as daunting a prospect as that remained, Kasimir was moderately hopeful of passing his spare time in a relaxing fashion and relieving the inevitable tension. That was until he returned to his room to encounter two small piles of folded noctys silk on his bed, topped with a handwritten note that merely said With the Queen’s compliments. At the foot of the bed, an assortment of handmade boots in dark grey centicore suede stood vigil, none of them looking as if they might offer a comfortable
fit.
“Well, Lord Citizen, I guess we can look on the bright side,” said Maradith, having joined him for his appraisal of this ominous gift.
“There’s a bright side?” asked Kasimir, while staring forlornly at the thin, mercilessly unflattering garments. “Please, enlighten me.”
“They could have just sent us a bucket of berry paste, a paintbrush, and a box of spiders,” she explained, wringing a laugh from Kasimir in spite of himself.
“Very true. Let’s be thankful for small mercies,” he replied, a little less abjectly. “Still … it’s hard to shake the feeling that this is a not so much a test as an insult, never mind a ‘courtesy.’ That doesn’t exactly fill me with optimism.”
“It needn’t be an insult, surely,” said Maradith, reasonably. “When you were deputising for the ambassador in Daevastan, you wore the national dress, didn’t you?”
“The national dress of Daevastan is voluminous robes you could lose a lamia in,” pointed out Kasimir, with longing. “Still, you may be right. There might be nothing sinister in this. I doubt it, but you never know. At any rate, it’s my job to take it like a man, though I may struggle to feel like one in any of these things,” he declared, examining a few of the disturbingly delicate-feeling garments and finding nothing likely to spare his embarrassment. With a sympathetic air, Maradith came nearer and sifted through the assortment with him, setting aside a few items as she did so. None of her choices looked particularly appealing to Kasimir, but since nothing in the entire collection did, he though he might as well give her the benefit of the doubt.
“Maybe,” she suggested, “if you were to wear these breeches with–”
“I question your nomenclature, Delator. Breeches would have more substance and less cling. Those are tights.”
“Probably, Lord Citizen, but if you were to wear them with this piece,” she advised, showing him a long tunic with a skirted hem under a narrow belt, “I reckon you’d get away with them. Especially with the knee-length boots. Drape a cloak or a cape around your shoulders, and you’ll look fine. A bit old-fashioned, I’d imagine, but perfectly handsome, just like one of King Heremod’s courtiers.”
“Yes, that ought to send the right pro-revolutionary message,” he quipped, with sullen irony. “Sweet Alyssa, I just hope that damn heliographer from the People’s Light won’t be sneaking around at this reception, or I’m at grave risk of beating her to death with her own copper plates. If the press starts circulating images of me prancing around in elf-silks … I don’t even want to consider it.”
“What’s the worst that could happen? The Senate would understand it was your duty,” said Maradith, and he lacked the heart to tell her how naïve a view that was, although he could picture the outcome all-too-easily: Stop press: well-known Alvere-lover Elwin Kasimir has finally gone completely native. Goodbye forever Mister Promising Career … “Anyway, with respect, Lord Citizen, you’re still a young man.”
“I fail to see what difference that makes.”
“Only that maybe you’ve less to worry about than I have,” she explained, as she examined some of the more obviously feminine-cut garments with a pensive, doubtful eye. “You’ll look fine, elegant even, but me … Am I not just going to look like a lumbering old warhorse in clothes like these?” Kasimir hoped this was a rhetorical question, because he was in no mood for doling out sympathy.
“You won’t be finding that out, Delator. You’re staying in uniform.”
“You don’t think this Queen Gloriana might take it amiss if you bring a uniformed delator to her soiree, sir?”
“I’m damn sure she will, which is part of the reason why you won’t be coming. More importantly, though, while I’m busy plying my trade, it would be a wasted opportunity if you didn’t ply yours …”
Thus, well over an hour later, Maradith was finding her own reasons for frustration, as her usual methods for stealthily scoping out an unfamiliar mansion – something she had more than the average share of experience in – were letting her down dismally. Trailing the servants was often a good way of finding and gaining access to their mistress’s private rooms, but not in this case. Not counting the labour gangs of disgraced Prince Rowan loyalists, who were only doing the heavy lifting, there were very few Alvere house-servants, and they seemed to follow no discernible procedures nor shift patterns. They lounged around their communal area, they chatted for minutes at a time in the corridors, and when they did actually deign to perform any household tasks, they seemed to be choosing them at random as far as Maradith could ascertain. Giving up on this course, she considered following the wiring of the servants’ call bells, only to find that it had all been ripped out and consigned to the recycling heaps along with the galvanic lighting. Seeing the lax way the staff went about their work, for want of a better word, she suspected that its de-installation had marked the one of the happiest days of their lives.
With no obvious short cuts to follow, she resigned herself to an old-fashioned ‘sneak and peek’ search of the east wing, picking the locks of the most promising-looking uninhabited rooms and, so far, being invariably disappointed. Many rooms had been stripped bare or, in the particularly depressing case of one private library, had been left with nothing but a few torn scraps of pages and some broken, empty shelves. Many times in her life, Maradith had tried to improve her own reading ability, but her word blindness had never permitted her to make any truly satisfying progress. Thus, she had long regarded the myriad public libraries of Lyssagrad, old and shabby although most of them now were, in the light of awesome, mysterious temples of knowledge. To see one in this sad state, its books consigned to a mass grave simply for being Lucinian as if the bloody books could pick their ‘race,’ she found both dispiriting and disturbing.
What is it they say? ‘Give an Alvere an indoor toilet, and he’ll just plant a tree in it.’ Even Maradith, who had regularly seen some of the least civilised behaviour Alvere had to offer, had thought that a stupid saying, but it had to be admitted that such scenes as this did not instil much confidence in their commitment to civilisation. Then again, maybe they just don’t want it on our terms. We were also fond of saying that Prince Rowan was a good friend of Lucinia, just the right sort of chap to keep the peace here … Sweet Alyssa, they must hate our guts. Those poor books had suffered in lieu of Prince Rowan’s corpse no longer being in a fit state to mutilate any further, and of the only flesh-and-blood Lucinians in the vicinity being under official protection. That made Maradith’s own position as a Lucinian sneaking around the royal residence exquisitely uncomfortable, so she resolved to get it over and done with as quickly as possible, and tore herself away from the purged library. Much as I hate to think it, rather the books than me …
Having exhausted all likely possibilities on the ground floor, she was heading along the corridor to the staircase when she heard voices from behind a nearby door. She could make out two of them, both male, one of them somewhat lowered, but the other regularly rising, as if the speaker was struggling to keep his emotions in check. Although palace gossip was certainly no substitute for detailed blueprints and battle-plans, by now Maradith was so desperate to learn something of value she decided that she might as well give it its due and crept nearer. A thick limestone pillar offered reasonable cover, should she find herself needing to dodge the sight of anyone emerging from the room or coming down the corridor, and it was just close enough to allow her to follow the conversation, and to easily fill in the few gaps, although the second voice was at least considerate enough to leave nothing to the imagination:
“… damn you all! How can you not see what he’s up to, Milord?” it asked, in a growling, exasperated tone. “Him and Queen Ironface. They’re laughing in our faces, I tell–”
“For Thalassa’s sake, keep it down, Lord Corin!” hissed the first voice, which sounded both older and higher, to say nothing of anxious. “Do you want the whole palace to hear? They’d like as not call it treason, you know?”
“Fuck me
, are we her subjects now, is it? Piss on that, Staakys. We’ve endured enough insults already.”
“My point exactly. Let’s not invite new ones. If there are slips to be made, let her make them. I still think that biding our time–”
“Has got us fuck all that I can see, and what in the Abysm would you take as ‘a slip?’ A signed confession that she and Lycon are making a private pact with the Lucinians, or a blow by blow account of how they’re planning to dispose of the rest of us stupid buggers when we’ve outlived our usefulness? Dream on, Milord. Of course, if you’d managed to get someone into this audience with the southerners, we might have found something out. If you ask me, though, it’s evidence enough that she’s only invited Lycon and his men to attend. How else do you interpret that?”
“Hmm. It’s not a very positive sign, I must admit. Alfric’s explanation was … quite plausible. Aren’t they always, though?”
“I call them sneaking and cowardly, but let’s have it.”
“Well, according to him, only those of his officers who have formed, ahem, ‘friendships’ with the ladies of the court have been invited to attend. I explicitly forbade my own men to fraternise with the Alvere, so none of them got an invite. I gather your own men have been too busy ravaging the border villages to make any intimate ‘friends’ here.”
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