The Plague of Swords

by Miles Cameron

  But his wife shook her head. “My dear,” she said, “if he has defeated the Wild, perhaps he is the man for the hour.”

  The duke’s skeletal face turned back to Kronmir. “You are not precisely an ambassador,” he said.

  Kronmir was pleased when a servant put a glass—a beautiful, elaborate piece of Venikan glass—into his hand. It was brimful of wine, and Donna Theresa caught his eye and her expressive eyebrows made a small movement that said, as clearly as speech, Endure this, and we will be friends.

  He had a sip of the wine. It was delicious.

  “Your Grace, I am here to gather information for the empire. I am an officer of the empire, from which you, in person and ex officio, have requested assistance.” He bowed. “Unless I am mistaken?”

  The duke pursed his thin lips and nodded. “Yes,” he said. “We are close to desperation.”

  Parmenio’s head came up.

  The duke looked at his wife, and then at two young men who stood together. There must have been nonverbal clues passed, as he looked satisfied. It was interesting that in a room with a dozen men and women, the duke only looked at a few.

  “Can you promise assistance?” the duke asked.

  Kronmir shrugged. “I am an officer, not the empire.”

  “I’m sorry,” the duchess said. She was like a gem—a beautiful round face, small hands, sparkling eyes. And yet, instead of the vulnerability of a small, pretty woman, she looked...hard. “What office do you hold?”

  Kronmir bowed silently. He did not want to state his office. It was not done.

  Donna Theresa seemed to understand, because she smiled and stepped forward. “Dinner is being served,” she said. “My husband and Master Kronmir have endured perils beyond anything you can imagine, Your Grace. Let’s allow them a dinner before the interrogation continues?” she said, and the two young men in the matching hose laughed. One came forward, as pretty and blond as the duchess and revealed at close range as her brother. He bowed. “Corner,” he said.

  His friend had jet-black hair, which he wore like a Galle, shoulder length, and he bowed as well. “Dolcini,” he said. “We are both named Lorenzo, so waste no time calling out to us. Surnames are the fashion here.”

  Kronmir smiled to both. They were obviously intelligent men, used to governing others, but what interested him was that Donna Theresa used the pause to whisper to the duchess and she turned a mild shade of pink and looked at Kronmir—and was embarrassed to be caught at it.

  They all went into dinner, the two Lorenzos chatting away as if their sole duty in the state were to entertain visiting imperial officers. The duke was placed in a chair very like a throne and carried to the head of a long table. Kronmir sat where he was told, by the duchess and across from Parmenio, who told the tale of the eight-day voyage and told it well, with only a little embellishment, two timely quotes from the ancients, and a bit of poetry.

  Kronmir’s role was, if anything, elaborated, and at one point Parmenio paused.

  “But there was another man—a fighting man. I would swear it. Yet I cannot remember what he looks like.” He glanced at Kronmir, who looked at his hands and said nothing.

  The story drew to its end, and the audience was appreciative even as they ate their pasta course and went on to fish—the clams Kronmir had seen earlier, and another dish, a risotto with squid’s ink that was among the most delicious things he had ever tasted.

  “And what office did you say you held?” asked the duke.

  His wife leaned over him attentively. “Ah, perhaps you’d like a little more wine?” she asked. “I would rather hear about this battle, wouldn’t you?”

  Kronmir, who had been plotting the death of the Archbishop of Lorica at the time, did his best to describe the demise of Thorn and the defeat of his army.

  The duchess put a dramatic hand to her throat. “The Red Duke is allied to the Wild, as well as fighting it?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Kronmir said, after a moment’s thought. It was true, and it was pointless to hide. Lying needed to be saved for special occasions.

  His affirmation did not create consternation, but something like it, and there was a buzz for several minutes in Etruscan and Low Archaic, as if they might imagine he didn’t speak the latter. He stared into space and tried not to let his eyes rest too fondly on the graceful form of the duchess.

  I am getting old and simple, he thought.

  But he gathered from their informed babble that they had already faced and defeated a wave of the Wild; irks and the eastern clans of the adversariae, who had struck over the mountains to the east, the mighty Sellasia range that ran from Arles in the west all the way east almost to the ancient borders of Dakia. They had come in waves and been defeated only recently at the edge of the mountains. He gathered that the duke and duchess had faced them in person. He gathered that the Patriarch of Rhum continued to refuse to believe that there were such Wild creatures and had contributed no forces, and neither had the Duke of Mitla to the west.

  It was clear from their conversation that Venike believed that the Wild was real. But that they had no idea of sides, or the existence of Ash. And they were afraid.

  “It is not enough that we have defeated a few irks,” the duke muttered as beautiful ricotta gnocchi with truffles were served. He looked around. “You know that the King of Galle is dead?” he asked.

  Kronmir was careful. “I have heard a rumour.”

  “Well, young man, I haven’t seen his corpse, but I suspect he is dead. His army destroyed, and the army of western Arles. Eastern Arles is already overrun. And three of the northern states of Etrusca sent contingents. Mitla, Genua, Voluna.” He steepled his fingers.

  A hush fell.

  “None returned. My own theory, or rather, Giselle’s, is that what we faced here, in the plains north of our lagoon, was merely a harbinger. Or even possibly a defeated rival, driven before the massed horde that now fights in Arles.” He looked around. “Let me be a little more precise, Imperial Officer. Our reports tell us that one man...just one man survived the rout. Somewhere north of the city of Arles, there is a deep dark hole into which has fallen all the truth and all the lies. Out of that hole comes...nothing.” He shook his head.

  The hush became silence. The almost-whispered word nothing seemed to hiss around the edges of the room like rats in the wainscoting.

  Kronmir leaned forward. “Nothing?” he asked. His professional interest was piqued.

  Donna Theresa nodded. “We have had no news at all since before the battle,” she said. “Couriers go and do not return.”

  “Indeed,” one of the Lorenzos said. “We begin to see a spread of this darkness. Now nothing comes to us from all of western Arles. Except one man of the militia of Mitla, who saw nothing of the battle, and who is quite mad.”

  “Nothing from Galle, either,” whispered the other Lorenzo.

  “You have sent trusted men?” Kronmir asked.

  The duke looked at his hands. “I sent my son,” he said. “He has not returned.”

  They sat in silence. The old duke looked up. His eyes were a vivid green, a surprising colour for so old a man. “It is like the end of the world,” he said. “Listen, young man. I am old, and I have seen many crises. Many moments when other men and other women cried that this incident or that war was the downfall of our state, but I weathered them all, and so did Venike.” He drew a deep breath. “This is different. Nothing natural destroys an entire army and leaves one survivor. Nothing natural eliminates...everything. My son was a careful man, and a deadly blade, and he has not returned.”

  “Nor the fifty lances he took with him,” one of the Lorenzos said.

  “You must have a theory,” Kronmir said.

  Theresa looked at the duchess, and the duchess glanced at the duke, and he made an impatient gesture.

  “Let us not dance while the city burns,” he said. “I believe that we face the Necromancer of Ifriquy’a. Or some lieutenant of his.” He waved. “The only survivor is i
n the care of Magister Petrarcha of Berona.” He looked at his wife.

  She looked at Kronmir. “You cannot be expected to understand the mare’s nest that is our politics,” she said. “But this one man, he did not return to his home city. Instead, he went to...Berona. As if drawn to Magister Petrarcha. Berona is our closest ally. And no friend to the Patriarch in Rhum.”

  Kronmir could see that something was not being said. But he nodded. “The possibility that the Necromancer was involved is contained in my instructions,” he said carefully, “as a possibility. Indeed, Your Grace, there has been some...contact, at the highest level...from my master to the powers in Dar as Salaam.”

  The duke sat back. His uncanny eyes went to his young wife, who was drawing in wine on the tabletop.

  “We also think that we are betrayed from within,” she said, her face etched in a misery that could not, Kronmir thought, be manufactured.

  Ah, Kronmir thought. He had wondered at the barges, the visit, the relative informality.

  The presence of only three servants for one of the most powerful men in the world.

  “Will you help us?” the duchess asked.

  Kronmir knew he should temporize and carefully avoid committing himself or his principal, who was, for all he knew, planning an autumn campaign in the west country against the dragon Ash.

  But Kronmir loved the game, and the game called to him, not just in the handsome person of the duchess, but in the seductive evil of a dark hole from which no information escaped. The challenge was magnificent.

  The threat, vast.

  Kronmir bowed. “Let me see what can be done, Your Grace,” he said. “The Duke of Thrake sent me to see what could be done.”

  “You are his military John the Baptist?” the old duke asked with bitter humour. “Remember how he ended, young man.”

  Kronmir found that he liked the skull-faced old man. Here was a professional, a man skilled at the art of government. “If I cry his name, in the wilderness, he will come,” Kronmir said.

  Their faces brightened, and Kronmir wondered if what he had just said was true.

  * * *

  Kronmir reviewed the single paragraph that the Red Duke had written him on the Odine and the Necromancer. He read it many times, and tried to imagine...

  Then he tried to imagine what kind of person would sell himself to such an enemy.

  Eventually, he slept.

  In the morning, he woke to light and beauty, the ripple of light on his ceiling reflected from the canal outside his window, and the smell of the sea. He stripped to braes and padded down to the loggia, where he found a dozen men already swimming. The water in the canal was seawater, changed with the tide, clean and wholesome. He leapt in and swam for some time. He noted that the local service was very efficient. He was watched throughout his swim, and indeed he was able to spot several watchers because of the early-morning hour and their habit of standing in the middle of the great bridges to watch him.

  He swam slowly, almost lazily, along the many palaces that fronted the canal. The water was clean, but he swam past the corpse of a donkey and what might have once been a man, and took more care. Venike was as grand a city as Liviapolis, or perhaps grander, and the there was so much wealth concentrated there, and some terrible poverty. He had never imagined the Nova Terra as a backwater before, but Harndon, which he had just left, seemed antiquated, even barbaric, by comparison.

  Toward the end of his swim, he went up the small canal that ran by Parmenio’s small palazzo and under the bridge and there, as he hoped, was a mark: two chalk marks in white, and a third in pale blue.

  He climbed out of the water by the small jetty, and two servants wrapped him in a towel softer and more luxurious than he had ever known before. He went to his room, dressed, and had a hasty breakfast of bread and cheese. Parmenio was still asleep, and Kronmir had no intention of waking his hosts. He bowed to the majordomo and went out into the sunshine to walk the city.

  He was followed from the moment he left the iron gate. He was careful, as he went, to keep his watchers satisfied. He made no attempt to lose them. Indeed, he calmed them with many small stops. He paused in a coffee house, and drank the beverage for which Venike was famous. It was available in Liviapolis, but even better here. He had two small cups, and then, filled with energy, walked across the great central square and came at last to Parmenio’s ship. He felt he had given a creditable performance as a man of average intellect who could not quite remember the city grid or where the bridges were, and then he went aboard. A dozen workmen were unloading, carrying barrels of Wild honey and boards of furs ashore. He slipped past them up the gangway and went into the captain’s cabin, where he fetched his shaving kit, left the night before in the hurry of leaving, and flourished a little too dramatically for the benefit of his watchers as he left the cabin.

  He wandered a little, investigating the smelly wonders of the fish market, and made his way back to Parmenio’s palazzo in time to find a disheveled Theresa and a rather smug Parmenio sharing a cup of hypocras and some sweet cakes, waited on by their servants who seemed more like family.

  “You walked all the way to the ship?” Parmenio laughed. “One of my riggazi could have rowed you there in five minutes.”

  “I like to see a city. This one is magnificent.”

  “You have never been here before?” Donna Theresa asked.

  “Never,” Kronmir admitted.

  “Yet your Etruscan is bold and fluid,” she said.

  He smiled at her compliment. “I thought of being a priest,” he said, “and studied for a while in Rhum.”

  Her smile flickered for a moment. “But you are of Morea,” she said.

  “I was a contrary youth,” Kronmir said.

  “You would have to be very contrary indeed to want to leave the benevolence of the Primate of Liviapolis for the rigours of the Primate of Rhum,” Parmenio said. “I for one bless the day that Venike chose the imperial primate.”

  His wife looked at him. Kronmir noted that look, adding it to the very slight hesitation that had come to her when he said “Rhum.”

  He went up to his room and lay on his bed, opened his shaving kit, and withdrew the folded piece of paper that had been tucked neatly inside.

  * * *

  Kronmir went out a second time with Captain Parmenio in the early afternoon. Both men had appointments at the ducal palace: Parmenio with the naval board, to report on the methods used to combat the sea monsters, and Kronmir to meet with representatives of the Seven. They shared an ombre, a small glass of wine, in a quiet square shaded by a magnificent old tree, and the world did not seem under so much threat, but there was a hush to the city that seemed odd even to Kronmir, who didn’t know its rhythms, and odder yet to Parmenio.

  “Most of our shipping is here,” he said. “Four-fifths of our ships must be in the docks, and no one is under repair.”

  Kronmir thought, The old man is thinking of packing his citizens into the ships and running.

  That’s how bad he thinks it is.

  The two men parted in the great square before the ducal palace and the magnificent basilica. Kronmir went into the church and, after whispering a question, was directed to the priest hearing confessions by the altar of Saint George.

  He knelt. The priest was old, with a strong face and a very old-fashioned tonsure.

  “What do you call yourself, my son?” the priest asked.

  “Dragon,” Kronmir said, giving the code of the day.

  The priest’s breath caught for a moment, and then he knelt beside Kronmir. “I have waited a long time,” he murmured.

  As it turned out, Kronmir made no confession. In fact, he listened a great deal more than he spoke. An onlooker might have thought it was the priest confessing to Kronmir.

  Eventually, he bowed his head, received a blessing, and departed.

  When he entered the ducal palace, it was more magnificent than any public building he’d ever known except the throne hall of the emperor
in the palace of Liviapolis. The stairs were all marble, and even small stairwells had coffered ceilings, recessed niches of statues—Saint Aeteas repeated endlessly, a superb tapestry of the Battle of Chaluns that filled one huge wall of the waiting room, where more than a hundred gentlemen and women, nobles, and merchants cooled their heels and waited, some with visible anxiety. Kronmir passed his name to the functionary and was almost immediately greeted by a liveried servant in curious white face paint who led him silently to a small door.

  “God bless you, brother,” said a total stranger. The man made the sign of the cross.

  Kronmir understood that the men in the waiting room feared the door he was about to enter. He bowed to the man and ducked through the door.

  The stairway climbed away at a steep angle, the stair treads narrow and wooden, but the walls of the stairwell were figured walnut in carved panels that flickered by him in the dim light. He understood few of the scenes, and wondered if he was meant to understand at all. Men were tortured in one, their entrails being pulled out and wound on a spit over a roasting fire painted in lurid colours. In another, two women flayed a man whose face of agony was so lifelike that Kronmir thought perhaps he could hear the scream, and in another a headman’s axe descended.

  The message was tolerably clear.

  Kronmir was alone, as far as he knew, on the stairs, and he wondered what would happen if he simply turned and walked back down, and walked out of the palace and into the great square where men and women walked free and sold fish. He told himself that he had nothing to fear, but despite his life of action, he feared torture. He had many secrets to disclose, and he would attempt to preserve them, and this would cost him much pain and humiliation.

  Kronmir knew all this, because he had been taken and tortured before.

  His legs continued to take him up the steep steps until he reached the dim light of a single small window, and then he came to a door that was closed. There was nowhere else to go, so he tapped once.

  A voice said, “Enter.”

  Kronmir pushed and the door gave easily. The room beyond was dim but not dark. Four robed figures sat at a bench. All wore red robes and white masks with white wigs.