The Madness of Kings

by Gene Doucette

  It did rattle Battine. She’d known since the bells rang that she might not survive this trip to Castle Totus. It was never her intention to risk the lives of the people offering to help.

  “You should go,” Battine said. “Right now. Show up in another part of the castle like you don’t know what’s going on and never met us.”

  “Nah. Haven’t finished the job yet.”

  “You got us to Lord Aginot’s chambers.”

  “Sure, and then you asked me to get you to the roof and here we are. Look, milady, every day in this castle is a risk for those of us at the bottom of the pile. I’ve always expected to go out by the rope; at least now I’ll pass on doing something interesting. Don’t whip yourself over it.”

  “That’s a fascinating perspective,” the professor said.

  “Stop being a tourist, Damid,” Battine said. “Orean, I mean it. Run away now and claim we forced you to help. You can be very convincing when you want to be and you know it.”

  “I get you. But it don’t seem…” Orean got a far-off look for a few seconds. Batt worried that the girl had heard someone in the hall and this was a bad thing, but that wasn’t it. “You do know the way to the roof from here, yeah?” she asked.

  “Sure,” Battine said. “We make that door and head up.”

  “And making the door’s the trick. I’m thinking just now, maybe I am done with you lot. In fact, this seems like a fantastic time to turn the both of you in.”

  “Okay…”

  “One thing; you’re gonna have to do me some damage.”

  A few minutes later the diminutive chambermaid showed up at the juncture of the main corridor and the eastern wing, about fifty paces from where Battine and Damid remained hidden. Her clothes were torn and it looked like she’d been punched in the face. She was crying and limping.

  Without preamble, she screamed. This drew the attention of essentially every guard on the floor, as well as everyone else who happened to be in the halls at the time.

  Battine was standing at the door to the room.

  The scream was the signal to be ready. Orean’s next step would be to convince everyone in earshot that the terrible, awful, evil Alconnot and her foreign lover went that way. Then she was supposed to scream again. Why? Well the real reason was to signal Batt that it was safe for them to leave. Orean’s excuse for doing so depended on her thespian skills.

  “I’ll wait ‘til one of ‘em rubs up on me and make a show,” she’d said.

  “Well,” Magly said, several feet from the door. “That should send them in from the promenade. Hard to believe such a loud noise comes from such a small body.”

  “I just hope they believe her,” Battine said. “I’d rather not doom too many people to the sword in the service of my own neck. Are you ready?”

  “I am.”

  The second scream came four minutes later.

  Batt opened the corridor and looked out. There were people out there, but all of them were facing the wrong way.

  She grabbed Damid’s hand, and the two of them ran for the stairwell.

  Thirty maders wasn’t a huge distance, but it could feel like it when one was expecting to hear someone shout, “There they are!” any second. They didn’t hear anything like that, because Orean’s absurdly loud hysteria was taking up all the oxygen on the floor.

  Battine kind of wished it had worked out differently; she didn’t know where they would be going after this (assuming they made it out of the castle at all) but it would have been nice to take the young maid with them. She deserved better than a return to castle duty. And a return-to-duty was the best outcome for the girl.

  The door to the turret stairwell was heavy, but thankfully not locked. She pulled it open and jumped through, waited for Damid to cross the threshold behind her, and shut it again quickly. Then she listened for evidence of detection.

  “I think we’re okay,” she said quietly.

  “I’m not so sure,” he said.

  She turned around. There was plenty of light to see by, as the sconces were filled with lit torches. But the reason that was true was that the stairwells were oft-used. Batt didn’t imagine this to be the case; as a royal, she hardly ever used them.

  The palace guard did, though. There were four of them halfway up the stairs from the lower landing who could attest to that.

  Damid backpedaled from the edge of the landing, until he was standing next to her.

  “I need about three minutes,” he muttered. “Can you buy me that?”

  “Sure,” she said, drawing her sword. “Why not? There’s only four of them.”

  “Princess, we don’t want to hurt you,” the guard closest to them said. He had his hand on the pommel of his sword, but hadn’t drawn it. This was unwise.

  “Then you’re not properly motivated,” she said.

  She kicked him in the groin and shoved him off the edge of the landing.

  In a just universe, he would have taken out at least one of the other guards on his way down the stairs, but all three managed to step aside.

  The next one to the top did draw his sword.

  “Lady Delphina, by order of the queen…”

  “Yes, yes.” She swung overhand, aiming for the top of his head. It was a power move that would have made less sense had they been on even ground, but he was lower than she was. He parried the blow, redirecting the force to his left. She went with the motion, spun around, and kicked him in the face. He did fall backwards into the next man, but the fourth got around both of them.

  This one had some real agility and acted like he’d been in a fight or two before. He swung his sword at her legs while still climbing, which forced her to back up a step and give him the room he needed to gain the landing.

  “Oh good,” she said, “you actually know what you’re doing.”

  “There’s no joy in this for me,” he said. Then he drove forward with a balanced attack, his sword swings short and controlled out of respect for the environment. She parried them, but still managed to get ridden back to the wall.

  “Has this been three minutes yet?” she asked Damid. He was standing in the shadows near the base of the stairs that led to the roof. That nobody had even bothered to check on him there suggested they didn’t consider him a real threat.

  He was busy pulling bits of metal from parts of his clothing—the things he’d taken from his bags earlier in the day—and assembling…something. A clothes hanger, perhaps. It didn’t look useful, whatever it was.

  “It’s been like thirty seconds,” he said. “but I’m almost there.”

  It was also possible the guards just didn’t realize he was there. The good-at-his-job palace guard she was fighting was sufficiently startled by the sound of Damid’s voice that he shot a quick look in the outsider’s direction. This provided Battine with her first opening; she took it, by dropping to the ground and spinning her leg into the back of his knees. (Not a sporting maneuver. If this had been during lessons, she’d have been disqualified by Brother Thibo.) The guard fell forward, caught himself and rolled over, meaning to push himself back up. She didn’t give him a chance, kicking him in the head as hard as she could. Blood arced across the landing from the broken nose. He fell back down again.

  In doing this she ended up with her back to the stairwell, which was bad form. Fortunately, the guard who made it to her first did so with his sword still sheathed. He wrapped two arms around her.

  “We don’t want to hurt you,” he muttered. “But we are capable of it. Yield.”

  Her arms were pinned to her sides, but her head wasn’t; she swung it straight back. Had he been a shorter man, she might have hit him in the forehead, but he was pretty big. All she managed to do was bounce the back of her head against his breastplate.

  He lifted her up until her feet weren’t touching the ground, taking out the possibility of just propelling the two of them down the stairs and hoping for a favorable bounce.

  “Yield, princess,” the guard said.

>   “No,” she growled. “You yield.”

  “I’m going to have to ask you to put her down,” Damid said. He stepped into the middle of the landing.

  There was some kind of gun in his hands. Battine may have grown up in a world of bows and swords, but she knew what a gun was.

  “That’s a forbidden device,” the guard said.

  “Funny, I don’t care,” Damid said. “It works just the same.”

  The guard on the floor—he with the broken nose—stirred and rolled over.

  “It’s not real,” he said groggily. “He was putting it together, it’s fake.”

  “You guys should trust me on this,” Damid said. “I don’t want to have to prove how wrong you are.”

  The other two guards reached the landing then, looking very much like they didn’t know what to do.

  “It’s a bluff,” the one holding her said. “He’s no threat; take him.”

  Damid sighed, squeezed the trigger, and sunlight erupted from the barrel of the gun. A brilliant ball of energy zipped through the air and struck the guard holding her in the shoulder. It was a glancing blow, thankfully, as the weapon was powerful enough to blow a crater in the side of the stone wall behind them.

  The guard was too busy being wounded to continue clutching Battine. His grip loosened.

  She fell to the floor, retrieved her sword, and scampered behind Damid. Her ears were ringing, and everyone else—aside from Magly—looked like they were in shock. The one who’d been wounded sagged against the wall clutching his shoulder. It didn’t look mortal in any way, but that shoulder had been covered in plate mail a second earlier; the metal was gone.

  “I warned you,” Damid said. “Now back up.” He looked over his shoulder. “Are you okay?” he asked her.

  “I’m a little blind.”

  “Sorry about that.”

  “It’s all right. Let’s go.”

  She grabbed his elbow and pulled him up the stairs. The guards looked entirely too frightened to follow, which was great except the sound the gun made was probably loud enough to drown out Orean’s screaming so in a second or two they’d be joined by the rest of the palace guard.

  Damid continued to back up the stairs slowly until they reached the next landing. Then they both turned and ran.

  “Will there be anyone on the roof?” he asked.

  “Hope not,” she said. “I don’t want anyone to give you a reason to use that again.”

  It was difficult to tell whether they were alone on the roof, because it was nighttime and there were no spotlights facing the roof itself. There were lights, but they were ringed along the edge of the roof, pointing outward. The spillover made it so they weren’t entirely in the dark, but the shadows were ponderous.

  As soon as they got through the door, Battine looked for a way to block it, but there wasn’t anything loose and heavy that would work, so she just leaned up against it.

  “Where shall we go now?” she asked.

  “The base of the Finger,” he said.

  “All right, but when it turns out there’s nothing there and we’re left with no choice but to flap our arms as hard as we can, you’re going first.”

  About halfway to the Finger, Batt thought maybe there was something there. Something airship-shaped, possibly, but under a tarp. As she suspected—it wasn’t nearly large enough to do much of anything.

  On arrival, Damid pulled the tarp aside with a flourish.

  “Like I promised,” he said.

  She laughed. “Gods, we’re going to die up here.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “That looks like a child’s toy. We’re not going anywhere in that.”

  It was, from nearly all angles, an airship in miniature. The full-sized ones sat between ten and twenty people, not including the pilot and crew while the smaller ones—like the one that came with her bequest—sat only five plus a pilot. But the basic design was the same and more importantly, the physics were the same: an enormous inflatable conveying a small cabin. The lighter-than-air mixture inside the dirigible was combined with regular air in varied quantities to allow it to go up and down, and the steam-powered engine worked propellers that pushed the airship forward or pulled it back.

  Too small a balloon and the ship simply wasn’t getting off the ground.

  It looked like the cabin for this ship was large enough to sit two (with one of the two being the pilot) except there was no room for the steam engine. Just the helium tanks should have taken up more room than the available space for the entire cabin.

  There was, in short, no way this airship could possibly work. Not even if the cabin was made of balsawood and she and Damid Magly were the size of rabbits.

  “Were you hoping for something more impressive?” Damid asked.

  “I was hoping for something functional. I’m beginning to think Kenson had gone mad, and you along with him. We can’t get away in this.”

  She began formulating a possible next step.

  They were within a few hundred maders of the turret stairs and even closer to the royal staircase. If they were very, very lucky in their choice of stairwell, they might be able to make it as far as the promenade. With the coronation happening that night, it was possible they could slip out, either through the gates or by commandeering an actual airship.

  It was a long shot, but odds were zero in Kenson’s miniature airship.

  “You know that won’t work,” someone said from behind her. She turned.

  Fergo was there, holding a torch in one hand and his sword in another. “The royal ships only fly for kings,” he said.

  “Faith-based physics?” she said. “You don’t believe that, do you?”

  “I’ve seen it. You think Kenson’s the only one with a personal airship?”

  “I think you’ve all gone insane. Every last one of you.”

  Fergo appeared to be alone. No telling which stairwell he came up or even how he knew to do so, but there was no army of men at his back.

  “How’d you know to look for us here?” she asked. “I didn’t even know to look for us here.”

  “I took a chance,” he said. “The professor asked to see Elisant’s airship in Extum, and twice asked if I thought Kenson used one during our journey to Totus. Now he’s led you into a corner, Batt. You shouldn’t have listened to him.”

  “I’m right where I want to be,” she said, drawing her sword. “Talking to my dear cousin Fergo. Why did you kill the king?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “You know very well that I didn’t, and neither did Damid. You set us up. Why?”

  “Yes, sorry about that. I needed someone to blame. Even if my hand was justified, an easier explanation for everyone was that the resident Alconnot and her outsider lover murdered the king in a fit of spite. It was really fortuitous, you two getting along as you did. I was going to pin it on just Damid, but there you were. Much better story.”

  “And yet, you say you didn’t kill him.”

  “I’m administering the King’s Justice! The gods struck down Ho-Kenson; I was only their instrument. Speaking of, I’m going to have to ask for that back.”

  “Yes, I don’t think so.”

  He tossed his torch aside. “All right,” he said, squaring up, “this should be fun. When was the last time we sparred, Batt?”

  “You cried when you lost. This will go worse.”

  He laughed. “I’m taller now.”

  She tore the maid’s dress off; no point in pretending to pass as anyone else at this point and it was only going to be a negative in a hand-to-hand fight. And it was going to be a fight. She could dispense bravado all she wanted, but Fergo Horace had been trained as well as she’d been. If she wished to run him through—and she did, even if it was her last act in this world—she’d need every advantage.

  “Then at least tell me why they wanted him dead,” Battine said. “Before I set about killing them one at a time, I’d like to know that much.”

  “I never a
sked.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  He shrugged. “I really didn’t. But my opinion? The invocation of the King’s Justice must have been in response to something Kenson either did or was about to do. Something existentially threatening. And my guess is our Professor Magly knows more about what that was than either of us. Now: Shall we go?”

  “We shall.”

  She took two steps forward before they were both bathed in light coming from the toy airship at her back. Fergo winced, blinded, and fell back several steps.

  Battine turned to apprehend what was happening—electric lights coming from a vehicle that clearly had no room for an engine to power them—when Kenson’s airship lurched past her, gained speed, and rammed directly into Fergo. The young Horace flew five or six maders in the air before landing awkwardly on his side.

  He didn’t get up.

  The airship spun around and came to a stop next to her. Damid popped out of a door on the other side of the cabin.

  “Are you going to get in or not?” he asked.

  “Does this have wheels?” she asked. The sides of the cabin looked like they were wood, and that wood went all the way down to the surface of the roof—almost. There was about a hand’s breadth of space between.

  “It does,” he said. “Four of them. And a lot of other things, too.”

  They both heard the sound of a door slamming from another part of the roof. Men with torches and swords had arrived.

  “Are you going to get in or not?” he asked again.

  “This inflatable is still too small to get this airborne. Do you mean to roll around the roof all night?”

  “The balloon’s for show; cut it off if you want. Just get in and it’ll make sense.”

  She did. Faith-based physics, she thought.

  Only maybe it wasn’t Kenson she was putting her faith in.

  Damid got back inside. He had a wheel on his half, and a panel full of electrical lights.

  She realized what she was sitting in. “Gods, this is a car,” she exclaimed.