by Ari Marmell
After what he judged to be about an hour and a half, Cerris was certain that every man in the hall was deep in slumber. Sitting up, he glanced around to confirm, and then rose, wincing at the faint popping of joints that were, despite his fervent demands to the contrary, growing older. Hefting the manacle in one fist, he stepped over the length of chain and crept on silent feet toward the door.
It was slow going indeed, for the room’s only illumination was the occasional flicker of the campfires outside, slithering in through tiny gaps in the wood or the handful of six-inch windows that prevented the air within from growing too stale. More than once, Cerris stumbled, and though reflexes born of a violent life kept him upright and silent, he still cursed his own clumsiness.
‘Getting decrepit, old boy. Slow and clumsy. Even just a few years ago, you’d never have …’
Then he was at the door, the time for bemoaning over, and Cerris gleefully shoved that voice back into its burrow in the depths of his mind. He knew that the door boasted no lock, but was held shut by a heavy wooden bar in an iron bracket. More than secure enough, since even if a prisoner could slip his chain, he had no tools at hand with which to lift that bar.
Except, of course, for the manacle that was supposed to be linking Cerris to the others.
For long moments, he listened, struggling to judge the number of guards by the occasional shifting of mail or bored sigh. Possibly only the one, he decided eventually, certainly no more than two. He contemplated a spell to cast his sight out beyond the door, but even after several years of practice, he found clairvoyance disorienting and difficult. He might learn what he needed to know, only to find himself in no shape to take advantage of it.
Ah, well. He’d faced worse odds, in his day.
‘Yeah, but you always had help facing those odds, didn’t you, “Cerris”? You never were worth half a damn on your own.’
He frowned briefly, pressing his lips tight, forcing himself not to respond. It had been years since he’d banished the vile thing that had once shared his thoughts, yet still he swore he heard that mocking, malevolent voice in his head. And all the more often, these past few months. He must finally be losing his mind.
‘Not that you ever had much of one to lose …’
“Shut up!” he hissed, even though he knew, he knew he was berating himself. He forced himself to relax with a steadying breath, then opened the manacle and began working the rod—a length of iron nearly six inches long, and almost as thick around as his thumb—through the gap in the door.
And thank the gods the Cephirans had been in such a hurry to throw this place together! It was tight going, but the narrow rod indeed fit. Cerris slid it upward, slowly, wary of allowing it to screech or grate against the wood. Inch by inch, carefully, carefully …
The rod touched the bar with the faintest of thumps. Cerris held his breath, waiting to see if the guard—guards?—had heard. Only when a full minute had passed was he confident enough to continue.
Here we go. All I have to do is lift a heavy wooden bar, with no leverage to speak of, toss it aside, throw the door open, and take out a guard or two before they have time to react. Nothing to it.
He allowed himself another moment to bask, almost to revel, in the insanity of what he was attempting. Then Cerris whispered a few more words of magic, one spell to alleviate a modicum of his exhaustion, another to cast an illusory pall of silence that might grant a few precious seconds. Then, squeezing both hands around the tiny length of metal, he tensed his back, his arms, his legs, and heaved with everything he had.
For a few terrifying, pounding heartbeats, he knew he’d failed. The bar had to weigh close to a hundred pounds, and trying to raise it with a few inches of iron felt very much like trying to lift a house by the doorknob. His hands ached where the metal bit into flesh, sweat masked his face, and a gasp escaped his lungs and lips despite his best efforts toward silence.
And then, praise be to the ever-fickle Panaré Luck-Bringer, his problem was solved for him. Something of his struggle—a breath, a twitch, a shiver in the wood—passed through both the door and his phantom shroud of silence. Uncertain of what (if anything) he’d actually heard, unwilling to look the fool in front of his comrades, and thoroughly convinced that the prisoners remained securely chained within, the soldier standing beyond did not signal for help. He did not raise an alarm.
He lifted the bar himself and pulled the door open a scant few inches, just to take a look and reassure himself that all was well.
The iron weight of the manacle—the cuff itself, not the fastening rod—made for a poor weapon, but better than none. Gripping the inner curve of the U, Cerris punched. The prong that broke teeth and tore up the back of the soldier’s throat might have left him capable of screaming, if inarticulately. So might the other, even as it crushed an eye to jelly against the back of its socket. But the both together proved too much, and the guard fell with a sodden thump, unconscious if not dead from shock alone.
Glancing around furtively, Cerris stepped through the doorway and slid the bar back into place behind him. Moving as swiftly as he could manage with the awkward load, he dragged the soldier away from the prisoners’ bunkhouse, easily avoiding the few wandering patrols that remained awake so late at night. He dropped the body behind a mess tent only after taking the man’s own sword and driving it several times through the corpse’s face, hiding the true nature of the fatal wound. He couldn’t avoid rousing suspicion, not with a dead soldier in the camp, but at least he left nothing behind to point directly at an escaped prisoner.
That bloody business aside, Cerris rose and chanted yet another illusion beneath his breath. The chain hauberk and gryphon-stitched tabard that shimmered into view over his prisoner’s tunic wouldn’t stand up to close observation, but they would do until he could find another guard—one who, unlike this useless fellow, was near Cerris’s own build.
ONCE SAID GUARD HAD BEEN LOCATED, and throttled from behind, the sheer size of the Cephiran occupying force actually proved an advantage. Unable to memorize the face of every soldier, secure in the knowledge that the prisoners were under control and that the highway patrols would prevent infiltrators from beyond, the men-at-arms at Rahariem’s gates waved Cerris through with scarcely a glance at his uniform.
Within the walls, Rahariem didn’t actually look all that different. Crimson pennants flew from flagpoles, yes. Many of the people wandering the streets wore tabards of a similar hue, and atop the walls and makeshift platforms rose an array of engines—mangonels, ballistae, even trebuchets—which had served to aid in the Cephirans’ conquest of Rahariem, and served now in its defense. But those streets seemed no less busy, the laughter in the taverns no less raucous. While the bulk of Rahariem’s working-aged commoners had been hustled into work camps throughout the city, the young, the old, and the infirm were permitted to continue their daily lives. Shops still fed the local economy, taverns and restaurants provided services to citizens and invaders alike, and of course the officers definitely knew better than to deprive their own soldiers by shutting down the brothels or taking the prostitutes off the streets.
Cerris strode casually along those streets, offering distracted nods to his “fellow” soldiers, salutes to the occasional officer, glowers to those citizens who had legitimate business being out after curfew. He made good time, as he knew he would. Intended to facilitate merchant caravans, the city’s broad streets were smoothly paved, running in straight lines and recognizable patterns. It was a layout that had served the city well—right up until it facilitated the invading troops just as handily.
‘It’s astounding these people even have the brains to know which end of themselves to feed. Ants and termites build more defensive communities than this. Serves them right, what happened.’
“They didn’t deserve this,” Cerris argued with that voice—his voice?—under his breath.
‘Oh, I see. They only deserved it back when it was you who was—?’
“Shut up!”
He barely retained the presence of mind to whisper the admonition rather than shout it to the heavens.
Glass lanterns on posts burned away the darkness, accompanied by stone-ringed bonfires the Cephirans had constructed in the midst of major intersections to illuminate the night more brightly still. Nobody was going to be sneaking around, not on their watch.
Nobody lacking a stolen uniform, anyway.
His back quivered with the strain of maintaining a steady walk when every instinct lashed him with whips of adrenaline, demanding he break into a desperate sprint. Every few steps he rubbed the sweat from his palms on his pant legs, and his eyes darted this way and that with such spastic frequency that he was sure he would soon learn what the inside of his skull looked like. Cerris wasn’t one to succumb to fear, and frankly being found out and executed as a spy would be a far more pleasant death than many he’d courted, but something about the need to remain so godsdamn casual got his dander up.
‘Or maybe,’ he swore he heard that demonic voice whispering, ‘it’s that you still believe, deep down, that they should be afraid of you.’ A moment of blessed silence, then, before ‘Even if you and I both know that there was never any good reason to be. Not without me doing all the heavy lifting. You never were much more than a porter, when you get down to it, were you?’
Finally, after a few more minutes during which Cerris was certain he’d exuded enough sweat to float a longboat, he neared his destination. The streets grew smoother still; some avenues even had mortar filling in the gaps between the larger cobblestones, to prevent carriages from rattling. The houses here were of a larger breed and stood aloof from one another, boasting sweeping expanses of lawn behind wrought-iron fences or stone walls. Here, in the city’s richest quarter, most traces of invasion vanished—except for the guards who stood at the entrance to each gated estate. These were clad in the ubiquitous crimson and boasted the night-hued gryphon, rather than the various colors and ensigns of the noble houses.
Just another example of Cephira’s commitment to “civilized warfare”—a concept that, where Cerris was concerned, had about the same legitimacy as “playful torture” or “adorable pustule.” The commoners might be pressed into service, but the nobility? Their soldiers and much of their staff were stripped from them, and they were confined to house arrest, but otherwise they remained unharmed and largely unmolested. There they would linger, until either their families offered sufficient ransom to buy their release, or until someone in the Cephiran military command decided that they posed a threat or possessed knowledge the invaders needed.
At which point, all bets were off. Civility only goes so far in war, after all.
“Colonel Ilrik requires information from the baroness,” Cerris announced as he advanced up the walk toward one particular estate, dredging from memory a name overheard during the past weeks. “I’m to question her at once.”
“What questions?” asked the first guard, a young man whose sparse beard did little to hide either his rotted teeth or his smattering of pock-marks. “What could Colonel Ilrik need with …?”
Cerris halted and slowly, deliberately, turned the full weight of his contempt upon the soldier. Eyes that had seen horrors few could imagine bored into the guard’s soul, and the younger man visibly cringed within his armor.
Expression unchanging, Cerris looked the soldier up and down as though examining a rotting, maggot-ridden haunch of beef. “My apologies, Baroness,” he said, his tone frosty as a winter morning. “I didn’t recognize you in that outfit.”
“I … Sir, I just thought …” The guard glanced helplessly at his companion for support, but the other soldier had the good sense to keep his mouth firmly shut.
“You’re still talking,” Cerris informed him. “You really ought to have a physician look into that before it affects your health.”
The pair moved, as one, to open the gate, the younger even tensing his arm in an abortive salute as Cerris marched past. The guards already forgotten—or at least dismissed as unimportant (he’d never forget a potential enemy at his back)—Cerris made his way up the familiar pathway. Around a few small fountains of marble and brass, and through gardens of carefully tended flowers, all of which were actually rather understated where the nobility were concerned, he followed until it culminated at the Lady Irrial’s front door …
Cerris paused a moment to scrape the muddy snow from his boots on the stoop, then entered the Lady Irrial’s parlor, all beneath the unyielding and disapproving gaze of a butler who probably only owned that one expression—perhaps borrowing others from his employer when the rare occasion required it.
“And is my lady expecting you?” the manservant demanded in precisely the same tone he might have used to ask And is there a reason you have just piddled on a priceless carpet?
For several moments, Cerris couldn’t be bothered to answer, instead gazing around to take in the abode of one of his new noble “customers.” Where previous houses had practically glowed with polished gold and gleaming silver, brilliantly hued tapestries and gaudy portraits, it appeared that the Baroness Irrial might have more restrained tastes. The chandelier was brass and crystal, but its design was more functional than decorative. A large mirror, framed in brass, stood by the door so that guests might comport themselves for their visit, and a single portrait—the first Duke of Rahariem, grandfather to the current regent and great-uncle to Irrial herself—dominated the far wall above a modest fireplace.
Finally, the butler having stewed long enough that he was probably about ready to be served as an appetizer, Cerris replied, “No, I don’t believe so.”
“I see. And do I recall correctly that you gave your name as ‘Cerris’?”
“I hope you do, since that actually is what I said.”
The butler’s non-expression grew even more non. “Have you any idea at all, Master Cerris, how many people show up here on a daily basis, expecting to meet with the baroness without an appointment?”
“No, but I’d lay odds you’re about to tell me.”
“None, Master Cerris. Because most folk are polite enough, and have sufficient sense of their place, not to arrive unannounced.” His lips twitched, and Cerris was certain that he’d have been grinning arrogantly if he’d not long since forgotten how.
“Well, I’m terribly sorry to have upset your notion of the rightness of things. Now please tell my lady that Cerris is here to see her regarding the family’s trade arrangements.”
“Now, see here—”
“Go. Tell. Her.”
“I shall have you thrown out at once!”
“You could do that,” Cerris said calmly. “Of course, then you’ll have to explain to Lady Irrial why she’s the only noble in the city who suddenly can’t afford textiles from Mecepheum, or imported fruits, or a thousand other things.”
“I … You …”
“Run along now.” He refrained from reaching out to pat the old man’s cheek—but only just. Cerris was actually rather surprised that the butler didn’t leak a trail of steam from his ears as he turned and stalked, back rigid, up the burgundy-carpeted stairs.
Only a few moments had gone to their graves before footsteps sounded again on those steps, but the descending figure, clad in a luxurious gown of emerald green girdled in gold, was most assuredly not the butler. She looked a decade younger than her years, apparently having faced middle age head-on as it drew near, and beaten it into a submissive pulp with a heavy stick. Her auburn hair, though coiled atop her head, was not so tightly wound as the current style, and her face boasted a veritable constellation of freckles. Most aristocrats would assuredly have tried to hide them with sundry creams and powders, but she seemed to wear them almost aggressively, as a badge of pride.
Cerris, who hadn’t really had eyes for a woman since—well, in quite some time—found himself standing just a tad straighter.
“Lady Irrial,” he greeted her, executing a passable bow and brushing his lips across her knuckles.
“
Why are you bullying poor Rannert, Master Cerris?” she demanded in a husky voice. Her lips were turned downward, but as he rose, her guest could have sworn he saw a flicker of amusement ripple across those freckles.
“Well, I didn’t think you’d appreciate me actually knocking him out, my lady, and bribing him just seemed so disrespectful.”
Those downturned lips twitched.
“Please be seated, Master Cerris.” She swept toward one of several chairs, gown swirling like a mist around her.
“Oh, just Cerris, please,” he said, sitting opposite her. Then, “I do apologize for just dropping by like this, my lady. I simply thought it best to make sure everyone got to know me, since we’re all going to be working together.”
“Are we indeed? And why is that, ‘just Cerris’?”
“I’m the new owner of Danrien’s mercantile interests.”
Irrial’s jaw went slack. “Danrien sold? All of it?”
Cerris nodded.
“I can’t believe it. That old coo—ah, that dear old man,” she corrected, recovering her manners through her shock, “ate, slept, and breathed commerce. I was certain that, come the day he died—Vantares be patient—his successors would have to pry his ledgers from one hand, and his purse from the other.” Her brow furrowed. “To hear Rannert tell it, you’re not exactly the most diplomatic individual. How did you convince him to sell?”
“Just worked a bit of my own personal magic, my lady,” Cerris said blandly.
