“Call me Kathur, Alban. Everyone does. And you?”
“Kourgath-eijo, from… From south and west of here.” Now it was Kathur’s turn to smile, both of them content with their exchange of lies. He had told her only that he shared names with the wildcat on his silver crest-collar, while south and west took in a sizable slice of the Empire, Vreijaur and the independent city states of Jouvann. His answer had answered nothing.
Her reply had been just as vague. Kathur, indeed! She had been named or chosen a name for the rich colour of her hair, because en-Keythar in Drusalan meant ‘fox’ and she had given him its feminine equivalent. There were folktales about the Wildcat and the Vixen, and Aldric wondered if this would be one with a happy ending.
He would have to wait and see…
CHAPTER FOUR
Aldric gave the stable door a firm push. It swung inward and a broad bar of dusty golden light speared past him into the gloom, pinning his shadow against the deep straw on the floor. He remained in the doorway for several minutes, not moving, saying nothing, just watching the hard-edged contrasts of sunlight and darkness for sudden movement. Widowmaker was in battle position now, down on his left hip, and his right hand had gone from the door straight to her hilt.
As his eyes became accustomed to the dimness they could see that everything was in exact order, and such neatness made him think again of what Kathur had said. His horses were safe. His harness was safe. His pack-saddle and its armour-boxes were safe, though doubtless as carefully searched as his saddlebags had been. Everything he owned was safe, except the silver to take him out of here at a time of his own choosing. Yes, that had been a selective fire indeed. Who had set it? Not a flicker of the thought showed on his face for the interested scrutiny of Kathur’s promised escort standing nearby.
It confirmed all his suspicions, not that Kathur’s transparent excuse had dispelled them for long. If the inn had indeed been burned as a first step of getting him where he was wanted, it was an act of such casual ruthlessness as to take the breath away. The act of someone who cared nothing for consequences or, because of who supported them, didn’t have to care. Or because they themselves weren’t someone but Someone. That thought was the most unsettling at all.
Lyard shifted in his stall, demanding attention from the one man in this whole place he recognised and trusted. Aldric patted the big Andarran courser’s questing muzzle and gave him an apple, autumn-wrinkled but still sweet, filched from a fruit-bowl in Kathur’s house. For fairness he gave another to the pack-horse, and crunched into a third himself as he scanned the stable building. He examined fresh bedding, new grain and clean water, smelt the slightly dusty aroma which told him the place was well-aired and dry, and nodded with reluctant approval, honest enough to admit he had wanted to find fault somewhere. He watched the horses consume their presents, inspected the tack set out on wooden frames at the far wall, then turned to stare at Kathur’s servant. This wasn’t the big man who had taken such an instant dislike to him, just a nondescript youth, but he represented eyes and ears where Aldric didn’t want them.
“How far to the harbour?” He asked the question in Jouvaine around a mouthful of fruit, deliberately rude. There was no answer and Aldric considered repeating himself in Drusalan though the apple might prove an obstruction even for that language. Besides, it was a language he had been at pains to prove he neither spoke nor understood, so he decided not to bother. “I’ll walk anyway.”
As he said it he ran one palm over the elaborate, expensive tooled leather of his high-peaked saddle. It was more expensive than any footslogging or carriage-riding Drusalan could understand, and his touch, as gentle as a man stroking the naked body of a lover, was accompanied by a little smile. He had good reason for the smile, because that touch proved he was still in control of his own fate after all.
The embossed pattern was a classic design for horse furniture, all loops and whorls, and it would have required an expert eye or the systematic destruction of the saddle to discover a single welt fractionally thicker than all the others. Its presence – and ensuring that nobody, not even Gemmel his own foster-father, knew of the change in the pattern – had cost Aldric an impressive number of Alban silver marks, enough to do the work and the rest to forget doing it. He had paid for the saddle after one more unpleasant conversation with King Rynert, and considered the money well spent. Sewn inside that ridge of leather was a parchment roll thinner than a goose-quill. It was a letter, but not an ordinary one, which was fitting on this far from ordinary mission for the king, and its presence set his mind a little more at rest.
Let Kathur the Vixen say whatever she pleased about the state of his finances; he could afford to buy a rapid, secret passage after all. Or even a ship. Aldric had to keep a smile off his lips, because that realisation hadn’t occurred until now. He could buy an entire merchant fleet, for the letter was credit scrip drawn on what the largest, wealthiest merchant guild in the northern Empire, and it was a note of hand good for thirty thousand Alban deniers’ worth of bullion gold.
Aldric had remained Clan-Lord Talvalin and unquestioned master of Dunrath for enough time to make good use of his rank and title. He wondered if anyone had yet noticed the guild-stamps in Dunrath’s treasury which effectively depleted it by one-third, and resisted an impulse to laugh out loud for the first time in too long.
Even though he had reconfirmed his wealth, Tuenafen still left Aldric ill at ease. Anywhere in the Western Empire would have had the same effect. Young Emperor Ioen and his rebellious Grand Warlord were heading inexorably towards armed confrontation after sudden and mysterious deaths struck the Imperial Court like a plague or, as fanatics proclaimed, the retribution of outraged Heaven. The deaths had begun with Crown Prince Taroen, killed in a hunting accident which many believed was no accident at all. They had moved like a scythe in wheat through courtiers, councillors, advisors and ultimately to Emperor Droek himself, found dead – of poison and horribly contorted, said one source, of other excesses altogether and smiling, said another – on a concubine’s couch in the Pleasure Palace at Kalitzim.
Until their sudden demise all had been puppets who danced obligingly when Woydach Etzel pulled the proper strings. Now the emperor’s surviving son, Ioen, found himself centre stage in a political drama for which he had never rehearsed, and that raised certain suspicions about the passing of his father and his brother despite the four years between their deaths. Not that anyone accused the boy himself. At the time of his accession to Crown Prince he was sixteen and incapable of such ruthlessness. Or so his supporters claimed.
That was either innocence or delusion and Aldric had given such beliefs a cynical smile, but there was no such presumption about Ioen’s guardian and mentor. Lord General Goth was capable of whatever he could justify, and recent months had shown him remarkably skilled at creating sound excuses for anything he did. Reports were rife of an assassination here, a kidnapping and imprisonment there, and skirmishes far more serious than the clashes between partisan gangs Aldric had witnessed once or twice in other towns. They had already happened in Tuenafen and the results were everywhere: broken windows and smashed doorway lanterns, with those as yet undamaged now protected by shutters or grilles of heavy mesh. Minor streets had been sealed off, and main thoroughfares had checkpoints manned by a city militia with authority to stop, search and if need be detain any who roused their suspicions.
The atmosphere was tense and strained, brittle as thin ice, yet to Aldric’s surprise people were going about their ordinary business in an ordinary way. They talked about what was happening in the Empire, things like the political divisions and the religious schism of the Tesh heresy, but always in roundabout terms that were vague, ill-defined and comfortable. They called it ‘Dissent’, or ‘Difficult Times’, or ‘Troubles’, but never the obvious ‘Civil War’ as if by not giving the situation its proper title they could deny its existence. It was the direct opposite of that old warning ‘say the name, summon the named’, but their laugh
ter when it came was forced and over-loud, and they had an unpleasant tendency to follow strangers with their eyes while never looking straight at them. Aldric caught such sideways glances more than once, and the way they flinched aside when his own met them. It made his skin creep. Somebody, somewhere, had told him why, and it was a reason so ridiculous that he had given it no credence then.
Now he wasn’t so sure. His taste in clothes was the problem. It seemed a preference for black and silver showed partisan support, for Woydach Etzel the Grand Warlord of all people, and with his foreign accent was enough to influence any who saw him. No one in the Empire was neutral. Either they approved of the way he dressed or somebody, somewhere, would find him so provocative that they would attack him – purely as a political statement, of course, with no personal animosity intended. As if that mattered.
And anyone attacking Aldric Talvalin with Isileth Widowmaker close to hand would end up sliced in half – purely as a reflex response, of course, with no personal animosity intended. As if that mattered.
It wouldn’t to an Imperial court, and it wasn’t the way to fade into any background. But it would soon be Aldric’s birthday, and he planned to be alive and healthy to celebrate it properly. If that meant borrowing enough money from Kathur to buy himself new clothes, then so be it. After all, she kept insisting how much she was in his debt. In twenty-three days he would be twenty-four years old. A quarter century, near enough, although sometimes he and others doubted aloud he would ever live so long. It would be ironic… No, it would be downright stupid if an unfortunate choice of clothes let some fanatic succeed where Duergar, and Kalarr, and Crisen and all their respective minions had failed. Light of Heaven, thought Aldric as he mentally reviewed the list, were there so many? Then he strolled around a corner for his first view of Tuenafen harbour, and that was when thoughts of the past were abruptly replaced by fears for the future.
Battlerams. Three of them, for the love of… Feeling like a cat gone mousing in a kennel it had though empty but which turned out to be full of mastiffs, Aldric slackened what had been an eager pace and stared at the anchored warships. Now another memory came forward, his encounter with the battleram Aalkhorst, and it was anything but reassuring. No, not three, he corrected as another predatory shape slid with heavy grace around the sea-wall. Four.
Four armoured warships, each of whose seven steel-sheathed turrets contained a chain-geared repeating catapult capable of reducing an enemy vessel to matchwood and drifting splinters. He had seen what they could do.
Aldric watched the new arrival join her consorts in the harbour. The long manoeuvring sweeps deployed from oarlocks near her waterline served to give the battleram the look of a monstrous, malevolent insect, and all her canvas was reefed except the spritsail puffed like a pigeon’s breast by a wind from astern. Yet the true wind of the world was an offshore breeze, raising choppy ripples straight toward the oncoming bow, so despite the Empire’s stringent laws against sorcery it looked as if the Fleet still had exemption. There was a wish-wind charmed into this warship’s sails, and perhaps the others too. She could go wherever she pleased whenever she pleased, regardless of the irritating vagaries of real weather, and she could do it far faster than any honestly driven vessel could hope to match.
Now if only he could see whose side these brutes were on.
But they had stowed their banners, struck their colours and displayed no marks of allegiance anywhere on their reptilian hides. There was a nameplate clamped to the flank armour of the new ship’s hull, but that was of little use. First it would need familiarity with the Imperial fleet, from coastal tenders on up, to work out whether Emperor or Warlord owned any given vessel.
And second, Aldric couldn’t read Drusalan. Speak it at least in the formal mode, yes, that was straightforward enough, but the written language used a different alphabet to the one shared by Alban, Jouvaine and Vreijek. In addition they only wrote down characters for consonants, representing everything else with dots, bars and chevrons. In his view it was all done for no other reason than sheer perversity and to annoy him.
At least the merchant guilds had more sense. A swift glance along the waterfront revealed what he had come to check and why he wanted to be alone when he did it. A painted wooden sign above a doorway bore the same crest as on his credit scrip and many bars of Talvalin gold. The glance was very quick indeed, for Aldric could feel the escorting spy close up behind him, no doubt watching for anything worth reporting back. Well, he would have little to tell apart from the fact that looking at the Imperial military unsettled Albans. Since that held true for most Imperial citizens, it wasn’t information with a great deal of use.
Aldric decided it would be prudent to get off the street and await developments somewhere more secluded, at least until he knew more about what had brought the warships here at such an inopportune time. Kathur’s house was one such place. As far as Tuenafen was concerned it was the only place.
There was a splash and a clatter of anchor-chain from the harbour as he retraced his steps. Sailors yelled instructions at each other as they secured the new battleram at her moorings and warped her alongside the others, and Aldric glanced back at them, then at the ship itself. Father of Fires, she was huge! The salt-stained carapace of armour was open in many places, and two crewmen emerged from a hatch to unclip the vessel’s nameplate and carry it below. As they lifted it, he could finally see the three characters spelling out the warship’s name and got a brief glimpse the geometric-patterned vowel values. They meant more as abstract art than as a written word, and he could only hazard a guess at how to pronounce it aloud.
Probably something like Te’Na’R.
*
In the early evening a bank of fog drifted in from the sea, and as it overlaid Tuenafen with a damp grey blanket the deep boom of a warning gong throbbed up from the harbour. Sitting cross-legged amid the rumpled quilts of Kathur’s bed, Aldric listened to its sonorous single note and sipped wine he didn’t want or need. He was trying, far too late, to ignore the warm silky skin pressed against his own and was just as acutely aware of a sensation which might have been shame.
Kathur rolled lazily onto her back, sated at long last. She scored the nail of one finger up and down his naked thigh, watching him through the tangled fringe of her copper-gold hair as she inhaled the sweet smoke curling up from burners near the bed. Something about his expression produced a drowsy giggle.
“What’s troubling you?”
“Nothing!” The denial came out far too hard, far too fast. “Nothing at all.” He was lying, and they both knew it. Aldric didn’t look down. Her bronze and milk-white body was a definite, indeed an all-consuming distraction to a mind which already had enough to think about and was working harder than usual to do so. Kathur had embraced not just her guest but the latest entertaining vice from the Warlord’s court in Drakkesborg and mixed a lavish sprinkle of ymeth dream-dust with her bedroom incense. The effect was wearing off at last, but his senses still weren’t entirely back in focus and Aldric didn’t like it.
Bedding Kathur hadn’t been his intention when he left her house, and even less so when he returned from the harbour. The sight of four Imperial battlerams with uncertain provenance would have squelched any such thoughts as effectively as navel-deep immersion in a bath of ice-melt.
It hadn’t been his intention when she stepped out of her bedroom just as he walked past in the corridor outside. To be fair he had toyed with the idea of paying her a visit, in case the invitation he had sensed was more than his own wishful thinking. She could tell him to get out of course, but then again she might ask him to stay. That, too, had been before the harbour and the battlerams.
It still wasn’t his intention even when he saw what she was wearing: a clinging, side-split, low-cut robe that flaunted her full-breasted, leggy beauty. The near-transparent satin clung like a crimson second skin and made it enticingly obvious there was nothing underneath but Kathur and a touch of costly perfume. Aldric had always trie
d, even if it sometimes took a lot of effort, to admire a pleasant view without needing to lay hands on it. He tried then, too.
But when she reached out without a word, cradled his face in palms and fingers and bent forward to kiss him full on the mouth – even barefoot she stood a handspan taller than he did – all that became a thing of wind and straw. For all its chaste brevity the kiss had brought a probing pressure of her tongue between his lips, then the swiftest promissory nip of teeth hinting at pleasures to come. After such a kiss even the sternest Imperial politark would have torn up his holy books, smashed his holy ikons and gone running after her.
Up to that point, when resistance became more than fevered flesh and pounding blood could bear, Aldric could have put hand to tsepan-hilt and sworn to the honour of all his intentions. But it seemed that bedding him was what Kathur intended all along, and she had done so most efficiently.
Efficiently? Yes, that was the only word for it. All the others – pleasurably, inventively, exhaustingly – were true enough, but faded into insignificance beside the practised skills she displayed in bed.
Is it the practice that galls you? he wondered. Because without it you wouldn’t have enjoyed yourself half as much. Kathur had known just when and how hard to use her tongue and teeth and nails and closely clutching thighs. Riding aids. Like putting a show-horse through its paces.
It was the detached skill with which she aroused him that wouldn’t leave his mind; as if his reluctance was a challenge to overcome and nothing more. Just once, almost by accident amid the sweaty athletic squirming, he had been in a position to stare for three full seconds straight up into her eyes. That memory remained with him and would do for a long time, because there was nothing in the dilated pupils of those eyes except enjoyment of physical pleasure. Kathur had no emotional connection with what she was doing. Even Gueynor, once of Valden and now Lady of Seghar, had felt more for him than the Drusalan woman did, and she had been paying for her own much-loved uncle’s quick and painless death.
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