Tyrant's Throne

by de Castell, Sebastien

  ‘He means you,’ Kest said.

  Brasti guffawed. ‘Hah! Don’t be ridiculous – just look at him. He’s got the worst sea legs of any man alive. If the barge had actually been moving during the fight with Evidalle’s men, he wouldn’t have been able to draw even one of his rapiers without falling flat on his arse.’

  I would have been keen to test out his theory but just at that moment there were other things concerning me. Two days of sailing had brought us to the Southern Sea and I now found myself looking out onto the endless expanse of water. ‘Are we . . . going the right way?’

  Chalmers looked down and asked Kest, ‘Is he truly this stupid?’

  Since my twentieth birthday, I’ve fought seventy-six judicial duels (not that I’m counting. Kest does that). I’ve been on the ‘vastly outnumbered’ side of more than a dozen different battles, thwarted numerous assassinations and faced an uncountable number of other attempts on my life. The fact that I’m still here and the majority of my opponents aren’t should say something about my capacity for both survival and violence. And yet I swear there isn’t a single person in this damnable country who’s afraid of me.

  Chalmers climbed down to stand alongside me. ‘Look over to port.’

  ‘Which one’s port again?’

  ‘The left.’

  ‘Then why don’t they just call it left?’

  Kest put down his book. ‘Because it’s only on the left if you’re facing the prow.’

  I sighed. ‘The prow is the front, correct?’

  He extended his hand in each direction while reciting them aloud: ‘Prow, port, stern, starboard.’

  In a fit of pique I repeated his gestures, saying, ‘Front, left, back, right.’

  ‘Oi,’ one of the sailors said, an offended expression on his face, ‘show some respect for the lady.’

  ‘The lady’ refers to the ship itself. That’s right: sailors are sufficiently stupid and superstitious to confuse a large, loosely held together heap of planks and canvas sheeting with a ‘lady’. I let the comment pass and turned my attention back to Chalmers. ‘You were saying, about my stupidity—?’

  She pointed to the left – the port – side of the barge. ‘See that big puddle of water out there?’ When I nodded, she said, ‘That would be the Great Bay of Pertine.’ She turned to the right. ‘And that large patch of—’ She motioned to the sailor, who was still standing there, a wooden barrel on his shoulder, apparently awaiting an apology on behalf of ships everywhere. ‘What do you call that non-watery thing over there again?’

  The man looked confused. ‘What? You mean the land?’

  ‘The land,’ Chalmers repeated to me. ‘That would be the Western Cliffs of Luth. So given that we have water on one side and land on the other, how exactly could we be going the wrong way?’

  ‘You know,’ Brasti said to Kest, ‘I’m starting to believe she is a Greatcoat. She might be too young for the job, and absolute rubbish with a weapon, but she instinctively shows just the right amount of deference due to the First Cantor.’

  I stared up at the cliffs a few hundred feet away – I couldn’t even begin to think in terms of knots or nautical miles or whatever the hells they used instead of normal distances – and felt profoundly uncomfortable. I’d been to Luth dozens of times – it borders my own Duchy of Pertine – but this didn’t look anything like it to me.

  ‘It’s a different view of the world, isn’t it?’ Kest asked as I clung onto the side.

  ‘I feel like a foreigner. I thought I’d walked or ridden across every inch of the country, and yet . . .’

  ‘Thirteen per cent,’ Kest said. ‘I worked it out once, in the map room at Aramor. In my life I’ve seen thirteen per cent of the villages, towns, cities and hamlets of Tristia.’

  I stared at him. ‘You’re joking.’

  ‘That was a few years ago, of course, but since the King died we’ve spent most of our time in places we’d already been before, so I doubt it’s much higher than fourteen per cent now. Maybe fifteen, at a pinch.’

  Tristia is a small country, or so I’ve always been told. I’ve seen maps of the known world, of course, and I can even name half a dozen other countries, but I’ve never been to those places – I’ve never left the land of my birth. To find out I knew barely a sixth of my homeland was troubling.

  ‘We’ll be entering Sanverio Gorge soon,’ Chalmers said, pointing at the high cliff. It looked like a giant had riven the coastline with an axe, leaving an impossibly narrow passage into the land itself.

  ‘How will we fit?’ I asked.

  The sailor behind us put down his cask and joined us. ‘We’re still a ways off. It looks narrow here, but it’s actually a good half a cable across.’

  ‘Half a what?’ I muttered.

  ‘About three hundred feet,’ Kest translated.

  ‘Won’t it be too shallow?’

  ‘Nah,’ the sailor said, ‘most of the river’s twelve fathoms.’

  ‘Seventy-two feet,’ Kest said before I had to ask what in all the hells a fathom was.

  As the barge sailed slowly towards the gorge it did eventually become clear we weren’t going to be crushed, which allowed me to relax just enough to feel seasick again. But the sense of being lost remained. I looked up at the Luth side of the gorge, trying to re-establish some sense of location. ‘The nearest town’s Elean, isn’t it?’ I’d actually been there once.

  ‘That’s miles away,’ the sailor replied cuttingly. ‘You’ve got a dozen villages between here and there.’

  ‘Vois Calan is the closest, I think,’ Chalmers said, peering at the cliffs looming over us.

  The sailor nodded appreciatively. ‘Exactly right. Well spotted, little girl.’

  ‘I’m eighteen, and I’m a Greatcoat.’

  He laughed. ‘Well then, well spotted, Trattari.’

  ‘Use that name again and I’ll—’

  Chalmers and I both stopped, realising we’d both spoken at once.

  The sailor threw up his hands and walked away as she and I shared a brief nod of acknowledgment.

  Maybe Brasti was right. Maybe Chalmers was a Greatcoat.

  ‘Anything interesting about this Vois Calan?’ Brasti asked. He’d hopped up on the rail and was hanging on to a piece of rope tied to something called a ‘mizen’. ‘I mean, other than the fact that they have a chair at the top of a cliff?’

  The rest of us shielded our eyes from the sun overhead and followed his gaze. I couldn’t see any chair, but I did make out what looked like a small crowd assembling near the edge.

  ‘Look at the path,’ Chalmers said.

  It took me a moment to make out the steep path carved into the rock; it was almost hidden in the shadows and scrub. There were two people slowly making their way from the shore, dragging what looked suspiciously like an unconscious or dead body behind them.

  ‘Well, that isn’t polite,’ Brasti said.

  ‘What are they doing with him?’ I asked, wishing my eyesight was even half as good as his.

  ‘Looks like he’s being taken for trial.’

  ‘How can you be sure?’

  ‘Well, first of all, I think the chair is a magistrate’s throne, and second . . .’ He pointed a little further along, away from the crowd. At first it looked like a row of little trees along the edge, but they were far too straight – and trees don’t usually have ropes dangling from their tops.

  ‘One usually doesn’t hang quite so many people at once without a trial,’ Brasti finished.

  I grabbed a passing deckhand. ‘Tell the captain he needs to stop—’

  ‘—weigh anchor,’ Brasti said helpfully.

  ‘—now.’

  The sailor stared back at me.

  ‘You mean “drop” anchor,’ Kest said. ‘“Weigh” anchor is the other one.’

  ‘I don’
t give a shit.’ I motioned for the deckhand to move. ‘Just tell the captain to make the damned ship stop and give me something that floats so I can get to the shore.’

  Kest glanced up at the late afternoon sun. ‘We’ll have to move fast. Village trials in Luth take place at sunset.’

  ‘Why’s that?’ Chalmers asked. ‘There’s nothing in the legal codes about—’

  ‘So they don’t lose time working the fields.’ Brasti was already packing up his quiver. ‘And so it’s over before supper. Nobody likes to watch an execution on a full stomach.’

  My mind had already turned to the problem of the time it would take to get up the cliff path. I’ve always had a dislike for hanging – apart from anything else, it tends to make appealing the verdict difficult. But more than that, I was sick and tired of seeing the law twisted into a means of bringing more death and destruction into the world. I needed to have words with this so-called ‘magistrate’.

  On a more positive note, I wasn’t feeling seasick any more.

  *

  ‘You see, this is why we ought to take up piracy full time,’ Brasti said, pulling himself up the slippery path. ‘We could spend our days relaxing on our lovely barge, enjoying the fresh salty air, drinking, carousing with other pirates, and hardly ever have to slog our way up a cliff only to face a mob who will doubtless be trying to send us right back down, only much faster.’

  ‘We’re not being pirates,’ I panted, wiping my sleeve across my forehead. The sun was dropping fast.

  Brasti paused to glance back at me. ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because pirates are outlaws and we’re fucking magistrates, you twit.’

  As he turned back to the climb, he added, ‘Sorry, my mistake. I must have forgotten about us being lawmen on account of all those years we spent, you know, running from the law.’

  ‘He has a point,’ Kest said from behind me.

  ‘I should have left you on the ship instead of Chalmers.’ I looked up the steep slope at the backs of the people dragging their intended victim to the top. ‘How far ahead of us would you say they are?’

  ‘About a quarter-cable,’ Kest replied.

  I turned back to him. ‘Are you trying to be funny?’

  ‘Sorry.’ He didn’t sound in the least bit sorry. ‘Roughly a hundred and fifty feet.’ He peered past me. ‘They’ll get to the top before we do.’

  I gave Brasti a push. ‘Hurry up.’

  He groaned in reply, even as he started jogging. ‘What damned good will it do, getting there faster, if we’re too shattered to fight when we reach the top? And anyway, who the hells goes to the trouble of dragging a man all the way up there just to hang him?’

  As Kest had predicted, our quarry finished the ascent a few minutes ahead of us, which gave them more than enough time to alert those waiting up top to our presence, and we arrived to find ourselves facing a crowd brandishing boar-spears and pitchforks.

  ‘What in hells is going on?’ I asked no one in particular.

  Having an angry mob ready to send us to our deaths wasn’t all that unusual for us, but your typical mob isn’t usually made up of some fifteen women and children.

  ‘You know what’s odd?’ Brasti said.

  ‘What’s that?’ I asked, unsheathing my rapiers.

  ‘This isn’t actually the largest group of women I’ve ever had try to stab me at once.’

  CHAPTER TEN

  The Magistrate of Vois Calan

  A stand-off is a particularly important moment during a fight, though to an onlooker it might appear to just be two groups of angry people glaring at each other, shifting their feet, gripping their weapons and, of course, hurling insults. I’m usually quite partial to that last part, but this wasn’t my usual sort of angry mob.

  I counted eleven women, none wearing armour or carrying themselves like trained fighters, two girls no older than ten holding rocks and two boys, even younger, hanging onto their mothers’ skirts. All of this presented a bit of a problem for me, not least because my usual repertoire of threats and insults included things like, ‘Drop that sword before I use it to cut off your balls and make you wear them like earrings!’ or ‘You’ve got until the count of three before I tell Brasti to fire an arrow right up your arse and out your cock!’ which struck me as particularly inappropriate things at this moment.

  Don’t get me wrong: I’ve fought – and been nearly killed by – any number of women, just not those who looked so utterly unprepared for violence. Somewhere nearby, a guitar played sombre chords, which was unusual, but not really my top concern right then.

  ‘Now, let’s be reasonable,’ I suggested, and that did the trick: the massed faces in front of me now looked completely comfortable with the idea of doing serious violence to me.

  Brasti snorted. ‘Did you just ask a crowd of angry mothers facing off against three pirates to be reasonable?’

  ‘We’re not fucking pirates!’

  ‘Perhaps we should tell them that,’ Kest said as he lifted his shield up just a hair. One of the women had pointed her boar-spear at our faces.

  She looked young to me, perhaps in her mid-twenties, although the years were already wearing hard on her body, if not her spirit. ‘You’ll not touch one scrap of what’s ours,’ she said defiantly, gripping her spear tightly in her hands. ‘Not our food, not our girls – so just you walk back down that cliff-path with your lives and count yourselves the richer for it.’

  ‘We aren’t pirates,’ I said.

  One of the little girls peered at our coats. ‘Then why are you dressed as pirates?’

  It hadn’t occurred to me before, but actually, our greatcoats didn’t look all that different from the one worn by an actual pirate I’d duelled years ago – though his had been a good deal more colourful, with a lot fewer pockets full of useful things, and luckily for me, a lot less effective in stopping a blade.

  ‘You see?’ Brasti said. ‘We’ve already got the ship and the clothes for it. The Gods themselves are practically begging us to take up piracy!’

  ‘The Gods are dead,’ I reminded him.

  ‘On this we can agree,’ said a new voice, and the crowd drew back a step and parted to make way for a white-haired older woman, likely well into her sixties, though still strong of body and with a posture that suggested she wasn’t anywhere near done with life yet.

  ‘Who are you?’ I asked.

  ‘I am Olise, magistrate of Vois Calan, and you are interfering with a lawful trial.’ Rather than wait for any reply of mine, she turned and gestured to the two women who’d dragged the unconscious man up the cliff-path. ‘Prepare him for the noose.’

  ‘Brasti . . .’ I began.

  ‘Let me guess: shoot the first person who tries to put a rope around his neck?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘I wouldn’t bother,’ Kest said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because if you look a little closer you’ll see he’s already dead.’

  I looked past Kest’s shield to the body being dragged across the rocky ground towards the roughly made gibbets. Kest was right: the man in question wasn’t unconscious at all. His limbs trailed awkwardly across the ground, most likely because every bone in his body was broken.

  ‘What happened to him?’ I asked.

  Olise looked at me as if I’d just asked why water is wet. She motioned to the gibbets and now I was studying them, I could see the rest of the occupants looked the same, as if their bodies had been crushed before being hanged.

  ‘He jumped off a cliff,’ she said.

  A couple of the women gave dark laughs at that, and the guitar played a sad counterpoint to their grim mirth. But most of them looked stricken, and one of the children began wailing.

  ‘It is a bleak humour you have here,’ Kest said.

  ‘These are bleak times, and an even bleaker place,’ Ol
ise replied. ‘I suggest you make for happier shores and leave us to our trials.’

  I gazed at the bodies hanging from the gibbets. Every one of them was male. ‘And in all of these “trials” of yours, how many of the defendants were found innocent?’ I asked.

  ‘None.’

  ‘What madness has overtaken this place?’ I demanded. ‘You drag dead men up from the shore and hold pretend trials, only to find them guilty and hang them? This isn’t justice, it’s a sham!’

  Olise glared up at me. ‘You’re damned right it’s a sham – and it is also justice. The only kind we can afford.’

  Her calm determination and the way the other women were looking to her for leadership despite the senselessness of what was going on here was maddening – although not half so maddening as the damned music. ‘Would someone please shut that minstrel up?’

  The guitar stopped and a figure rose up from behind one of the gibbets. ‘No one may tell a Bardatti to stop playing, Falcio val Mond. Be thankful I don’t play a snake melody to slither its way into your dreams and drive you insane.’ No sooner had I registered the deep, feminine voice than Nehra stepped into view, guitar still in hand. ‘On reflection, a snake melody probably wouldn’t have any effect on you, given how insane you already appear to be.’

  ‘What in the name of—?’ Once again I struggled for a Saint’s name. Since the Saints I’d grown up with had all been killed and I didn’t know any of the new ones, cursing had become a real trial.

  ‘Go with “Saint Drusian-who-falls-amongst-the-dead”,’ Kest suggested. ‘Apparently he’s the new Saint of Sorrow.’

  Unlike Rhyleis, who looked exactly like the seductive portrayals of Bardatti troubadours immortalised in the tapestries of wealthy nobles and the imaginations of young men and women everywhere, Nehra could easily have been mistaken for a farm labourer: she was stocky, with plain features and short hair kept tidy without any attempt at style. She neither dressed nor acted the part of a Bardatti – but when she played, the beauty and power of her music was almost frightening. If there was anyone more highly respected amongst the Bardatti, I had yet to encounter them.