by M. C. Planck
“It doesn’t have to be like that,” he said, but the words were hard because they were perilously close to a lie.
She shrugged, almost invisible now. “You came too late,” she whispered, and then she was gone, a wind blowing away in the night.
Stunned, Christopher opened his eyes and caught the falling body, dropping his sword heedlessly to the floor despite the danger of its sharp edge. The woman was dead in his arms. He opened his clenched fist. It contained a bright purple pebble, the tangible remains of her soul.
Lalania stared at him. “I did not know that death was a possible result of this spell.”
He sighed. “Nor did I.” Just another truth he had not had time to learn.
2
ARBITRARY VALUE
“Why can’t I revive him?”
“You already know.”
“Tell me again.”
Lalania sighed. They were alone in the throne room for a few moments, a rare respite from the steady stream of petitioners, salesmen, and complainers. That Christopher chose to spend that time rehashing this old argument should have annoyed Lalania, but he suspected her sigh was only for appearance’s sake. It had become a comforting ritual for them both. In the light of the death of the assassin, this might be the last time.
“He has lived his span. Threescore and ten, and the magic stops working. It is the fate of all children of men; it is the time allotted to them upon the stage of the world.”
“That’s . . . ridiculous.” He glared at his sword, the tangible symbol of his patron, its hilt high and ready in the scabbard attached to the cold marble throne. “That’s a completely arbitrary number. It doesn’t apply to elves, and they’re so biologically compatible they can mate with humans.” Or so he had been told; the bards were more than willing to gossip about that race of creatures whose exalted nature made them largely insufferable.
“On the contrary,” she said, happy to have a chance to contradict him. “Elves cannot be revived; your power does not extend to them. The compact they made with the Gods for their extended life is not without cost.”
He transferred his glare to her, through lowered brows. “They can be reincarnated, which for them means the same thing as revival in the end.” The Lady Kalani had mentioned the cost of reincarnation—a life trapped in a nonhuman body—even as she explained her mitigation. For a shape-changing elf, it amounted to no penalty at all. And all elves could shape-change.
“Then how much more you must pity the ulvenmen, whose span is measured in single years rather than scores.”
She said it only to distract him. It worked, however, because he did pity them. The wolfmen, with their savage claws and staggering appetites, were ill-equipped to deal with the complexities of a moral life and robbed of the time to learn.
She watched him brood in silence only for a moment. As usual, she could not bear to let him wander in the weeds without her direction.
“It may be arbitrary, but is it not necessary? The old oaks must eventually fall; else the saplings would never have their day in the sun.”
“But it’s not necessary. That’s what arbitrary means. Somebody picked that number just because . . . There’s no reason for it to be so short.”
She pulled a dubious face. “How would you know what reasons they did or did not have? Do you think the gods should appear before you and make an accounting of their wisdom?”
He thought about it but only out of habit. The answer was obvious. “Yes.”
The laughter burst out of her despite her thespian discipline. “I would say the throne has made you prideful, but I know you thought the same when you were only a first rank.”
“Long before that,” he muttered.
They were spared by the entrance of the next court case. As the sovereign, Christopher sat in judgment over the peers, but as lord of Kingsrock, he also judged the commoners of his county. This was his least favorite duty. The nobles were entitled, wealthy, and possessed of supernatural powers. Knocking them down a peg or two was generally satisfying. The common people were just poor. He had never realized that the only building with more misery than a hospital was a courtroom. A steady stream of tragedy flowed through his door, and there was surprising little he could do about it.
A large, lumpy man in craftsman’s clothes took his place in the docket. The bailiff swore him in using the peculiar customs of this land.
“State your name.”
“Throd Morkmonten,” the man grumbled. Such an absurd appellation would normally have made Christopher suspicious of mockery. But not here.
“State your crime.” The bailiff glowered until the man answered.
“Household discipline.” A euphemism for domestic violence.
“State your innocence,” the bailiff instructed.
The man opened his mouth and wrestled silently with his tongue for a moment. Christopher rolled his eyes. They always did this, every time, despite knowing his rank. There were, of course, people who could defeat the truth-spells of a twelfth-rank priest, but this man was manifestly not one of them. No commoner had a chance against the magic lain upon this courtroom in Christopher’s annual ceremony of dedication.
A torrent of words burst out. “How else am I to maintain my household? The woman forgets; she is not right in the head. I could easily throw her out and get a younger one. A cuff to the ear is only kindness. And within my right, by ancient law and tradition.” Notable among the words was the absence of any protestation of innocence.
“It is also within my right, by law and tradition, to sentence you to the lash, is it not?” Christopher asked.
The man squirmed only briefly. “Of course, my lord.”
“Then perhaps three lashes is only kindness. Since you seem to have forgotten my law.”
The doughty Throd had more to him than met the eye. His face turned to the floor, his eyes cast down in submission, he nonetheless stood his ground. “Yet the question remains, my lord: how am I to maintain my house? The woman drinks and neglects her duties; the children sometimes go without a noonday meal.”
Christopher almost smiled. “You seem a clever fellow. I’ll trust you to figure it out. If it turns out the fist is occasionally necessary, then I shall accept that. Just as you must now accept that occasionally the lash is necessary to maintain my kingdom. Three lashes for every blow of the fist. If you don’t like the price, find another method.”
Justice was a star in the distance. The best he could do was the pale light of mercenary economics.
Lalania intervened. “The Bardic College holds classes every ten days. Make time to learn a different way or grow a thicker hide.” That was his criminal justice diversion program: a series of conflict resolution lectures by professional prostitute-spies. Attendance was surprisingly high, but that was probably due to lecturers being beautiful young women in skimpy clothes. How much of the lesson sank in was a question he had not figured out how to ask yet. Still, it couldn’t hurt.
The bards had done far more for the crime rate by simply asking questions. Nobody had dared to lie to the previous king, either, but Treywan was known to not care overmuch about dead bodies in alleyways as long as the corpse’s tael was still intact. Between the bard’s investigations and Christopher’s affiliation, the murder rate had dropped to merely impulse crimes. These put Christopher in a terrible bind since he could usually revive the victim, but at a price he did not care to pay. The old system had allowed the perpetrator to make restitution, but this meant exchanging gold for tael. Christopher did not want to part with tael. Nor did he want a judicial system where the rich could simply buy their way out of thoughtless violence. Consequently, he had passed an absolute law: any killing other than self-defense led to the noose. Everybody hated it, from the peasants to the nobles to Christopher himself. But after he hung a knight for chasing down and slaughtering a boy who had thrown a stone at him, they abided by it.
There was a lot of abiding. Pretty much everyone expected his reign and its many a
nd varied insults to tradition to be temporary. They stored up their passions and grit their teeth. The nobles plotted and the commoners seethed.
Except for his soldiers. Their status and privileges had gone up, not down. They served under honest and fair commanders for a lord who revived them, were paid decent wages, and fought with guns instead of swords. They had gone from the most despised class—commoners serving as expendable monster bait for the nobility—to police with the power to arrest the peerage. Consequently, they were extremely loyal and obeyed every order without hesitation. Christopher’s nascent democracy was in fact a theocratic military cult maintained by armed force.
This was not even remotely what he had intended, and yet it was such an improvement over the previous administration that he could not walk away. So here he sat, trying to beat mercy into brutish illiterates at the end of a whip, and hanging them when he failed.
“You understand, right?” Christopher asked as Throd began to leave. “I will keep hitting you until you stop hitting other people. Because it’s the only way I can get you to stop hitting.”
Throd looked up at him curiously. “To live is to suffer. The strong thresh the weak until stronger arise. How else shall mankind survive in this vale of tears? You apply the lash to thousands; someday one shall wield the whip in his turn. Just as King Treywan harried you into his throne.”
Nothing was as it seemed in this world. His dirty peasant apparently was a philosopher of rhetoric in disguise. This annoyed Christopher unreasonably.
“Dark take it,” he swore. “How can you be so smart and still not see? Bailiff, make it six lashes. The quicker to harry our good man into wisdom.”
“You can’t do that,” Lalania said. “Never mind the illogic; it violates your precedent.”
This was what proved he was other than a tyrant. This was all that kept him sane. He leaned back in his chair and nodded his surrender. The bailiff led the doughty Throd out of the courtroom to carry out his original sentence.
“Every time you allow me to correct you in public, you look weak.” Lalania was frowning at him.
There were arguments he could have made. That the public needed to see even their liege bound by the rule of law; that they should think of him as a man rather than the incarnation of pure good; that sound arguments should defeat moments of passion. The truth was simpler and more personal: he needed her disapproval. He needed her to frown at him. It was the only thing that kept him from falling into her arms. He could not say these words, so he said nothing.
Rescue came clad in green leather. A party of Rangers approached the throne. Their arguments were always sharp and hard, but he appreciated them. He didn’t have to pull his punches. The Druidic counties were the only real threats to his rule as, they could defeat his riflemen in guerrilla warfare or simply decamp into the far Wild. Their constant demands for more Ranger promotions were a source of never-ending strife, and every time he lost the argument, he got raked over the coals by the Blue church for not promoting more of their knights. He leaned forward, looking forward to saying “No,” forcefully and repeatedly.
The faces of the men before him gave him pause. They were troubled rather than angry, hesitant rather than demanding. Christopher would have named it fear except that the word did not seem to apply to Rangers.
“We apologize, my lord,” said their leader, “for interrupting your court. But we must report. The realm is in danger.”
A welter of emotions flitted through him: relief, for an external threat to unite the realm and justify his army; outrage, for the peasants who must surely die, viewed as nothing more than treasure to be harvested; fear, for whatever fantastic predator this turned out to be. At the last came anger. Whatever it was, it was surely a product of the hjerne-spica. the squidotian nightmare that lurked in the dark, provoking strife to advance its goals. Because those goals included his own rapid rise through the ranks, he was often the beneficiary of those peasant souls. A gift he dared not refuse, since he would need the power their lives bought him to defend them from the next threat. And ultimately from the Black Harvest, the cataclysmic doom when the hjernespica would consume every soul in the kingdom, having judged it ripe for the plucking. Consequently, the last four years had taught him to run toward danger, the sooner to end it.
He rose from the throne, calling for his horse and armor.
3
WELCOME TO GRACELAND
The riders came to a stop at the edge of the clearing. Each wore varying styles of armor, from the traditional knightly platemail, to the overlapping serpentine scales Christopher had liberated from the ulvenman chieftains, to simple chainmail. They were armed equally eclectically, with swords ranging from rapiers to great twohanded cleavers to katanas. The only unifying element was the guns: rifles and revolvers bristled in profusion. Christopher alone did not carry one.
Several of the horses were destriers, huge fighting beasts who glared at each other and snorted in warning if any got more than a nose ahead. Their riders were of similar temperament, although they did not snort.
“It’s a trap,” Cannan said. The big man glowered over the forest to the south from the back of his equally big horse.
To Christopher, it didn’t look any more dangerous than Central Park. The trees were gently spaced, the grass neatly cut, the ground free of leaf-litter and weeds. All that was missing were some park benches and a few streetlights.
On the other hand, the part of his brain that had become acclimatized to this world was screaming. Nobody here had a riding mower. So who cut all this grass?
The Rangers had been less than helpful. Their explorations had mapped only the northern edge of the park. They avoided the area, fearing that even spying on it would in turn reveal too much information to whatever lived inside. As long as the border did not expand, the Rangers were content to leave well enough alone and trust their neighbours to do the same.
“Of course it’s a trap,” Christopher answered. That much was obvious. The problem was that he did not know whose trap. Had the Rangers lured him out here to kill him off on a hunting trip? The plan had precedent after all. Was the whole thing a setup by the Wizard of Carrhill and the Witch of the Moors, using magic to disguise the true nature of the forest? Those two certainly wouldn’t object to a stack of dead Rangers as collateral damage. Or was the hjerne-spica testing him by setting monsters against the realm? For all he knew, the thing had run out of patience and wanted to eat him now.
The only way to find out was to walk into it. Christopher wasn’t entirely stupid; he wasn’t walking in alone. Behind him was a column of infantry, cavalry, and artillery, a thousand men and several hundred horses, wagons, and guns. At his side were people of rank in addition to his normal retinue. Both the Lord Ranger Einar and Duke Istvar accompanied him today, with squadrons of their own cavalry. For magic he had his own priests and Friea the Skald, head of the Bardic College, riding on a well-formed and lively roan mare. Lalania was careful not to outshine her boss, which meant that the most attractive woman in the column was actually an aged spy with a mind as sharp and devious as a panther. Not that anyone could tell; the woman looked barely eighteen and simpered like a schoolgirl whenever a man so much as glanced at her. Christopher found the whole thing ridiculous, but apparently it worked. Istvar kept going on about breeding a foal off Friea’s mount, talking about the various qualities of stud horses he had at home.
He could divide his kingdom into the loyal and disloyal simply by glancing over his shoulder. The leaders of the loyal faction were here with him, risking their necks, and the disloyal were at home, waiting for him to die. For the most part that was fine. He didn’t need any more knights and rather wished Istvar hadn’t brought his. They were expensive to revive because they generally expected to have their rank restored. However, he would have appreciated the company of either the Witch or the Wizard. He barely understood divine magic, and arcane magic was an entirely different beast, as Master Sigrath had made clear just before being
consumed by his own demon.
“I will lead the way,” Istvar announced. His knights perked themselves up because riding into mysterious forests to face unknown monsters was apparently something to look forward to.
“It would be wiser to send infantry first,” Karl said. “They will search the ground for snares that might injure horses.”
“Good point,” Christopher agreed, and waved a squad forward. Istvar’s face darkened, and Christopher realized he’d fallen into Karl’s trap. The young man’s reasons were sound—not only were the infantry cheaper to fix, but armed with rifles and grenades they were as powerful as the knights—but that was not why he had suggested it. Heroes were the first to advance into danger. Karl was taking that job away from the ranked men and giving it to farm boys. And reminding Istvar that a commoner outranked a Duke in this army.
That was itself another good reason. Christopher swatted his own mount, Royal, on the side of the head to bring it back into line. It was as upset over the infantry advancing first as Istvar was. Both the horse and the man would just have to get over it.
“If you would seek snares, you should send those who can set them.” Einar was grinning, or as close as that granite face could get to it. He was clearly enjoying watching Karl and Istvar spar, since his own Rangers were vastly superior for this task than either of their troops.
“I’m sure there will be plenty of dangers yet to come,” Christopher said, managing not to sigh. Lalania’s public speaking lessons were having an effect on him. “Everybody will get a turn.”
“Fairness in round,” Friea said, “and round again. And yet, my lord, perhaps you should not be entirely fair. The realm would be sorely grieved to lose you.”
“It would miss any of us, my Lady.” That seemed like the diplomatic thing to say.
She shrugged, managing to make her chainmail jiggle in interesting ways. “Not myself. Uma already chomps at the bit; she should take the reins before inaction dulls her spirit. If I fall in battle, I beg you only to return the trappings of my office to her.”
