Fugitive Prince

by Janny Wurts

  By then, Dakar had insinuated a hand under one doxie’s blouse. The other, who was blond, kissed him silly until his means to escape into a numb stupor had been squandered. He tried to take his leave, but his chance-met acquaintances towed him along, disregarding every protest as they rollicked their way past the shops on Weaver’s Alley.

  Nobody was either upright or sober. To missteps and shrieks of uproarious glee, they ricocheted off signposts and buildings. The doxie donned a wig of yarns cut from the warp ends of a loom, then embarked on a simpering impersonation of the crown exciseman’s second wife. Hurting with laughter and winded as well, after dodging some spiteful matron’s barrage of flowerpots, Dakar folded in half to catch his wind. When the placement of a lamppost stopped his list toward the pavement, he seized the moment to take stock.

  A hooked sprig of gentian trailed from his ear. Crumbled earth and shards of terracotta sifted down his collar from his hair. He suffered the twinges of a bounding headache, and wine fumes made it difficult to think. Instead of drinking himself painlessly senseless, he found himself perspiring and itchy as a dog in the untidy wool of his jerkin.

  His uncoordinated squirms to shed the hot garment dislodged his last sovereigns. The pair rolled in chiming duet down the gutter.

  Shopgirls and whore butted heads as they pounced. Since the cobbler waxed morose, they rescued Dakar from the jammed wads of his clothing and chivvied him down a back alley to purchase more spirits.

  “We need a rum seller,” slurred the potter. “Since the day those blighted ships sailed and vanished from the harbor, every dive in the quarter’s turned lousy with off-duty guardsmen.”

  Dakar agreed. As principal henchman to the pirate responsible, he held no enthusiasm for hobnobbing next to crown soldiers. Distressed by untimely reminder of his angst, he latched onto the first available crock and sucked rotgut spirits until his middle felt tight as a blowfish.

  Afternoon passed in a dizzy whirl of noise, the indistinct moments overlapped on themselves like a salvager’s haul of glass and flotsam. Dakar stayed transfixed while the cobbler fell prostrate. Cart traffic jammed. Burly teamsters shook their fists in an argument over which should step down and drag the lout clear of the thoroughfare. The Mad Prophet bet a penny on the outcome, then wandered in circles, confused. A swarthy cooper insisted the combatants were knocked senseless, while the potter swore by the toes on his feet that the town guard had dragged off both parties. Dakar blinked like a turtle. Sunk in cogitation to recall which cheating craftsman still owed him a winning portion, he tired of walking, and wound up parked on his hams in a bakery.

  The potter seemed content, crunching down the stale shortbread stars left over after the solstice. When his gestures grew vehement, he fell off his stool. The baker tried to right him and got his eye blacked. Tossed back on the street, Dakar had to stop and grope for the coins to buy another jack of whiskey. His doxie had vanished. He refused to go farther without a replacement, and there she stood, scaling cod over a bucket by a cookstall. The potter settled down, obliging, while Dakar kissed his newest find, his gaze gone dewy from her overwhelming perfume of fish oil.

  The shops closed. Dusk loomed like smoky pearl through the drifting snags of river mist, while Dakar swore and wept, half-prostrate across the butt of an unopened keg. Four apprentices from the blacksmith’s helped him free the jammed bung. The singing after that became damaging, with Dakar by then doubled over in the gutter, caught in between a whistling bout of hiccups and the necessity of rendering his gorge.

  Night fell, and the crabbed old torchman lit the lamps. Stumbling past the flare of his wind-jerked brand, Dakar reeled and collided through streets grown inexplicably crowded. He felt no premonition, no compelling sense of urgency. His tipsy curiosity led him to surmise that some disturbance had arisen in the market square. Rather than fight the press, he tacked that direction. The throng soon jostled him away from his companions. If they had gone because his wallet was empty, the fine point scarcely mattered. Mazed by the muddle which foreran a damning hangover, Dakar pawed the sleeve of a maidservant to ask why the festival should happen five days late. “Can’t anybody see? The moon nearest to spring equinox passed her full phase last week.”

  Her words about captives and barbarians at the gates seemed a ridiculous fiction.

  Dakar called her a liar, swore back as he was sworn at, then reverted to unctuous, smiling beneficence as her burly pack of brothers grasped his collar. Their fists shot him reeling through a mailed cordon of armed men, and he escaped getting skewered because he fell.

  He flung out his arms to break his headlong sprawl and plunged to the wrists in a warm, clotted mass of bloodied straw. The spill was fresh. Dakar recoiled, slammed witless with revulsion. He yelled and scrambled upright to denounce the royal guardsmen for staging their unruly public spectacle in a slaughter yard.

  Yet words never came. Speech foundered, as if nervous reflex reacted a heartbeat ahead of trained mage-sight. Jarred from his drunken stupor as water might slam into rock, Dakar pulled up short, crumpled over by mangling nausea. The pale, phosphor haze twined through the night air was not steam winnowed up by the chill, but the imprint of spirit light shocked free of live flesh at the moment of violent death.

  The aura dispersed by this recent act of bloodshed resolved no animal’s dumb agony. Dakar retched with horror, caught in reverberated pain pitched too fine to be other than human.

  The spasm sapped all his volition to move. Dakar hugged his griped middle and wished the rest of his awareness would stop functioning. Then perhaps he could deny that what arose above his head was a scaffold for a public execution. He dared not look up lest he find himself damned. Ath preserve, while he drank, Arithon had been left undefended. Lord Jieret had delivered them a warning and a prophecy. Regret came, too late, and the sorry, wretched fear: that the blood on his wrists could be royal.

  “Come on, you! Move along! You’re in the way.” The guardsmen had outworn their patience.

  When they prodded with pike poles and gained no response, they hauled the barging miscreant to his feet without care for his mewling denial. Garbage thrown by the screaming mob splattered against the boards and someone’s poor aim raised a bold round of raillery from a prisoner. The accent sounded too clipped to be townborn. Since no city officer or tribunal seemed in evidence to restore the crowd to civil order, logic at last wakened reason. The condemned men had to be clanborn. Dakar’s chastened glance showed one already dead, with two more bound up for disembowelment.

  He lurched against restraint and rounded on the guardsmen. “Ath, you can’t do this!” He shot a drunken kick at the nearest man-at-arms, impelled by white rage and urgency. The law’s murdering, thirsty sword must not reap another irreplaceable bloodline. “Your prince has commandeered these captives as galley slaves!”

  A mailed fist smashed back and silenced him. “Not this lot. Now be off.”

  Dakar was ejected by two brutes with maces, who rammed him into the surging onlookers, then closed ranks to reform their cordon.

  “Gutless sheep!” Dakar yelled through a stinging, split lip. “Whose order commands this?”

  “Be still, you fool!” A woman snatched his elbow to restore his good sense. “These skulking clan curs tried to slip through our gates. For that, their lives were called forfeit.”

  But Dakar shook off her well-meant restraint. “Do I look like an idiot? No clansman would visit a walled city unless he was crazed with a death wish!” Yet even as he spoke, he discerned the contradiction: messengers from Lord Maenol might attempt such a course if they carried a warning for Arithon.

  Belligerent with rum, Dakar rammed the soldiers, screaming to demand a stay of mercy.

  Too late; across the pale span of boards overhead, amid the streamed sparks from crude torches, the sword fell and rammed home. Blood sprayed from a man’s opened chest. Painted in gory, flittering light, his death spasms splashed Dakar in a hot, obscene rain. “No! Save us all! Stop lest you
call down disaster!”

  The executioner heeded no outcry amid that raucous sea of noise. Raised above a crowd that howled for a spectacle, he angled his stroke to claim his last victim.

  “Let the man live!” Dakar ducked a pike staff. Citizens hemmed him in too closely on all sides. No spell of illusion his power might fashion could sway them in time to matter. Left no better course, he jammed his shoulder in someone’s ribs and tried a fumbling charge to fling himself onto the scaffold.

  The bite of armored hands ripped him back. He fought and clawed, flayed the skin off his knuckles in attempt to land punches on chain mail. The one soldier he felled clamped a hold on his ankle. Another’s blunt weapon clouted the back of his neck.

  Vision imploded to a blast of white sparks. Dakar swayed as his knees gave. The torches upended. The studs of a guard’s armored bracer rasped his cheek. Then howling darkness arose and engulfed him; not from the blow. Nor yet from the hammering kicks which tumbled his body on the paving.

  “Spare me, no,” Dakar gasped. But no round of pummeling could avert his cascading slide into precognizant trance. The noise of the crowd dimmed inexorably into distance as consciousness frayed into the welling, black tide of his spurious talent for prophecy.

  He beheld the low, serried flats near the marshland of Mogg’s Fen. Bare tufts of brush snagged through a floss of pale mist and moonlight. Amid mounded hummocks and the quartz sheen of streamlets, men skirmished.

  The light-footed, furtive ones wore the undyed leathers of clansmen. Their opponents sloshed ahead in a body, encumbered by shields and byrnies. The glint of their helms bobbed like bubbles in lead as they hacked at cattails and sunken logs in attempt to rout out lurking foes. Southward, they pressed, to the beat and clang of metal. Harried officers kept them moving, while arrows hissed in, and ambushes and traps minced at their flanks and impeded their forward progress…

  The vision spun away like a scene in dropped crystal.

  In its place, Dakar viewed the high frame of the scaffold. As if he were drifting unseen as a spirit, he saw Riverton’s executioner flick the gore from his wide, fullered blade. Bloody handed, the man shed his hood. His stubbled, lantern jaw pebbled the light like red sand-stone as he ran his gloved fingers over his sword to test for nicks in the edge. Behind his set profile, the three condemned clansmen sagged naked and broken in death. The posts which held them spread-eagled stood as pillars against the stars, flicked into coppery, shifting relief by the streaming billow of the torches. Slack fingers still wore the glazed sweat of suffering. Unclotted blood seeped, glistening, from the corpses’ hacked chests. Dakar failed to banish the horrific vista before his seer’s gift veered sighted dream into nightmare:

  The gaped-open maw of dead jaws clicked shut. Glazed eyes swiveled in slackened, dead faces and fixed in reproach upon him. Then dead tongues stirred in dead mouths. ‘We failed in our task. Our life’s charge becomes yours. Warn the Teir’s’Ffalenn! Forsake plans in Riverton and see him away before sunrise. Lysaer s’Ilessid marches from Hanshire to close a Koriani trap…’

  The whispered chorus of the slain leached into a future scourged through by light like a cleaver: a storm-torn night ripped apart, and the air recoiled to a fell slam of thunder. Ripped out of darkness, a mercury ocean frothed and boiled into steam. Like dropped spills touched to flame, a thousand riven fragments of cordage and wood rained down upon the flecked foam. The wrecked shreds of ships and the frayed wisps of charred sails hissed through the roiling vapors…

  Dakar screamed for the agony of a world gone mad, and then knew nothing more.

  The stink of rat urine and musty, rotted straw told Dakar where he was before he opened his eyes. His scapegrace past had dumped him, manacled or caged, in city dungeons times beyond counting. The drip of condensation down nitrous walls seemed common to stone cells everywhere. Nor was he stranger to the twinge of stiffened bruises, or the dull, throbbing aches brought on from an unconscious night lying supine on dank floors.

  A headache of exceptional virulence made him feel as if demons with steel hammers played carillons on the bones of his temples. Through excruciating pain and the soured taste of vomit, Dakar clutched his crown to keep his skull from flying to pulverized bits between his fingers. His brain felt like jelly mashed through a sieve. The evils of strong drink were never so punishing. By contrast, vile sickness and palsy never failed to afflict him after an episode of prescience.

  Against the grandiloquent maceration of his hangover, a racket of echoes spiraled down a stairwell: “…disorderly conduct, attacking royal guardsmen, not to mention disrupting the peace at a public function.” The speaker added in nasal superiority, “There’s certain to be a stiff fine.”

  Dakar plugged pudgy fingers in his ears, too late to evade the dismal conclusion. “Those who can’t pay get hard labor on the hulks towed out for dredging the harbor.”

  The talker scraped to a stop outside the barred cell gated shut with riveted-steel strapping. “He’s in here. You did say the man you want’s the fat loony?”

  Dakar cracked an eyelid and winced through a spearing dazzle of torchlight. “Is it night, or next morning?” he rasped. He could not recall why he felt nagged by a shadowy sense of urgency.

  No one gave him answer. Outside the cell, hatched in squares by forged bars, Caolle flourished the slate he carried to overcome the glamour which slurred his clanborn accent. His tough, swordsman’s hands scrawled sincere imitation of a yokel’s straggling script, then thrust the message under the turnkey’s beaky nose.

  “You say he was drunk?” the jailer huffed. “That’s no excuse. You’ll find the offense with the minor charges listed after disorderly conduct. The fat wretch is your friend? Then toss a penny in the tide to give dame fortune her due. If the raving idiot hadn’t been sotted witless, our guards would’ve seen him spitted beside that pack of condemned barbarians. Best take him in hand. He won’t have a long life, showing pity for that breed of felons.”

  Caolle scratched out a new sentence, then flipped his slate like a tray and cast a chiming spill of coins over the letters which spelled, ‘fine, paid in full.’ Then he tipped his laden tablet toward the turnkey.

  Gravity obliged; the gold pieces slid. The jailer watched what amounted to a generous year’s salary tumble toward the stinking, runneled floor. Decision became reflex. His spidery fingers swooped to capture the bribe. “This is irregular,” he grumbled, in no haste to unhook the keys from his belt. “The city’s grand magistrate ought to be called to preside over due process.”

  Caolle proved impervious to argument. He snatched the loose key ring, tongued the iron in the lock, and clashed open the hasp and grilled portal. Dakar cringed from the clangor of iron. His evasion saved nothing. His rescuer caught his wrist and hauled him headlong from his noisome nest in the straw.

  “Damn you, for bingeing,” Caolle muttered as he towed his redeemed miscreant toward the narrow turnpike stair.

  Dakar moaned. “Let me stay. The risers are too steep.”

  When he tried to collapse, Caolle shook him. “Sober up, fool! You’re needed.” Steel shackles in putty, his hold never loosened as the Mad Prophet stumbled and tripped. “Arithon’s taken with some sort of fever.”

  “If you have to shout,” Dakar groused, “at least wait until we’re outside.”

  “I’m not shouting.” Caolle slammed shoulder first through the upper-landing portal, and chivvied his charge through the magistrate’s chamber, a cavernous space of scarred wooden benches and the fetor of old sweat and dried ink. The Mad Prophet shivered as they passed the justiciar’s dais, then the prisoner’s dock with its rows of forged rings for manacles.

  Torches still burned by the entry. Gagged by a billow of oily smoke, Dakar missed his stride. His fragmented vision resurged and gave birth to a hollow spasm of alarm. He bludgeoned dulled senses to gauge the turn of the stars. Only two hours left before dawn.

  Caolle was still energetically speaking, his words unintelligible gib
berish to the sentries standing bored watch by the portal. “We have trouble afoot. Those clansmen who died were Lord Maenol’s own cousins. They would scarcely have wasted their lives in a town without the most dire reason.”

  Dakar lagged again as full memory returned like a battering onslaught of cavalry.

  “Don’t mind the guards,” Caolle snapped in abrasive impatience. “I bribed them on my way in.”

  The Mad Prophet gave up his effort to shield his tender eyes from the sconces. Tugged stumbling into the sea-damp night, and a mist like dew-sodden velvet, he grumbled in plaintive injury, “You needn’t tear off my arm. I know the message those couriers carried.”

  “What?” Caolle plowed to a tumultuous halt. “Ath, man, you spoke to them?”

  “No.” Necessity and pain made Dakar succinct. “Their execution wakened my prescience. And Arithon’s not ill.” He broke off, wrung by a pestilent shiver.

  Caolle suffered the delay in steaming, clamped patience. Around them, the clogged air clung like silt. Lights from the wharves shot ruddy spears through the tenements, and seepage off the overhanging eaves splashed echoes through the darkened alley. Dakar ground on between dry heaves. “We’re in deadly trouble. If I’m right, your liege has been touched by the madness of Desh-thiere’s curse.”

  Never slow to grasp threat, Caolle began running. “Then someone’s told the s’Ilessid prince we’ve compromised the shipyard?”

  “Worse,” Dakar panted. Even crimped like a bolster, he made every effort to match the increase in pace. “Lysaer’s marching on Riverton with a fighting company at his heels. They would’ve arrived yesterday, but clansmen from Korias slowed them down. Lord Maenol’s messengers died to bring warning. We have maybe two hours left to force Arithon away before a royal cordon seals the gates.”