Deceptions (Ascendant Book 3)

by Craig Alanson

  A crest of the Falco family, for this part of the palace was old enough to have been built before the Trehaymes took over the throne of Tarador. Seeing the missing crest and imagining his family’s symbol that had once been there made Duke Falco’s grind his teeth briefly, then he shook his head and concentrated on his purpose that morning.

  The light from his lantern shown between the iron bars, illuminating a layer of dust on the stone floor of the hallway, or, Regin realized, it was actually a tunnel. Dust along both sides of the tunnel floor was darker and dotted with splotches, as water condensed on the rough bricks of the tunnel walls and roof and slowly dripped down to the floor. Other than the splotches of moisture, the dust was undisturbed. No one had been into the tunnel in a long time.

  “Down there, Your Grace?” One of the guards replied, expressing mild surprise. “It is access to the, the-”

  Another guard spoke. “To the water system, Your Grace. There is a pipe underground, I believe it cuts directly under our feet, carrying clean water from the cistern atop the east tower.”

  “Ah,” Regin nodded. Clean, fresh water from a fast-running stream coming from the royal forest north of Linden was brought to the castle through an aqueduct, then pumped by windmills up to the cistern at one of the highest points of the castle hill. Water flowed out of the cistern to various points around the castle, providing drinking water. The Falco’s home castle in Burwyck province had a similar system, although there Regin had installed two additional cisterns with enough capacity to store water for six months. If anyone ever laid siege to the Falcos in their home, the ducal family would not run out of water, for they could also collect rainwater from the roof. In Linden, Regin thought with disdain, the royals could not hold out nearly as long against a siege. The difference was the royal residence in Linden was a palace, dedicated to pleasure and the affairs of state rather than to defense. If Regin sat on the throne, there would be many changes in Linden, and seeing to the security of the palace would be among the first of those changes. “Open this gate.”

  “We can’t, Your Grace,” the first guard looked stricken. “Only the chief of the palace guard has those keys.”

  Regin inspected the gate itself. It was heavy, and although it had been painted regularly enough for layers of paint to build up in corners, dots of rust marred the surface around the critical hinges. Streaks of rust ran down from the bottom hinge. “You have been in there?”

  “I have, Your Grace,” answered the second guard. Anticipating Duke Falco’s next question, the man stepped forward. “The water system is inspected once each year, in summer when the royal family is at the summer palace, and the cistern can be drained for patching and cleaning.”

  Regin nodded, for much heavy work was done around his own ducal castle during the summer. “This year?”

  “Your Grace,” the man’s cheeks reddened, “I am afraid to say that as the princess was at the summer palace only briefly and her mother remained here, we did not have the opportunity to perform the usual-”

  Regin spun toward the guards with anger. “Do you mean to tell me the girl who is both crown princess and Regent is on her way here at this very moment, and the security of these lower passages has not been reviewed in over a year, though Tarador has been invaded and our armies have only recently stemmed the enemy’s advance??”

  The guards looked at each other. “I will bring the chief guard immediately, Your Grace,” one of them stammered and ran off, his boots slapping on the hard floor.

  The chief guard resentfully came to the tunnel entrance, then gave the keys to Duke Falco, grumbling that the guards had better things to do. For the remainder of the day, Regin and a rotating pair of guards inspected all the tunnels, with the duke impressing the guard force by his diligence. Thick spider webs, tunnel floors slick and stinking with muck from dripping water, narrow passages where the Duke needed to squeeze through by himself, nothing deterred the man who ruled Burwyck province. Exhausted guards returning from exploring the lower tunnels reported the duke was tireless in his effort to secure the palace before his future daughter-in-law arrived. And they reported the duke did find issues which needed to be attended to; rusted locks, bars where the metal had corroded away from the stone and mortar it was fastened to, even one alarming instance of a gate with one set of hinges loose from its mounting. The chief guard hastened to make repairs, though some repairs required the services of the Royal Army engineers, making them unhappy also. He muttered to himself that Duke Falco was making a huge fuss about nothing, that while security of the lower tunnels might be less than perfect under the palace, access to the other ends of the tunnels was assuredly secure. How, the chief guard asked aloud to no one, could an enemy agent get into the palace through a water aqueduct? Impossible! Even if, in the extremely unlikely event an assassin could get into an aqueduct, the man or woman would be trapped in there, for the heavy iron covers were fastened and locked from the outside. The enemy would be trapped and drown, or die of exposure in the cold water. Impossible, the chief guard muttered as he shook his head. The only benefit to the duke poking around in the warren of tunnels under the palace was it kept the damned man from making trouble elsewhere!

  “Your Grace, if you will allow me past you, I can-”

  “Nonsense,” Regin told the man coldly, refusing to move aside to let the guard squeeze past him in the narrow tunnel. “You think me fragile, spoiled and useless because I am a duke? In my home keep, I personally oversee security arrangements twice a year, and I do not miss a single nook of my castle.” What he said was true, because Regin did not trust anyone with his life, a lesson he learned from his father. And a lesson Regin had painfully been taught by his younger brother, who twice attempted to have Regin killed while they were boys. Their father had laughed at the younger boy’s first clumsy attempt at assassination, and only sent Regin’s brother away the second time because the foolish boy had involved a rival ducal family. Murder within the Falco royal family could be forgiven if it was done for the reason of grasping for power, but stupidity and embarrassing the Falcos could not be tolerated. Thus, Regin’s younger brother had been sent on an ‘educational’ journey that eventually took him all the way to the Indus Empire where he remained, acting as the Falco’s trade representative in that far-away land. The two brothers exchanged letters once or twice a year, without any trace of familial affection. Both brothers preferred their relationship to be strictly business; their business ties meant they needed each other and that need kept them both alive.

  The duke held his lantern in front of him, peering down the tunnel to see the low-ceilinged chamber where the tunnel ended. The brick roof of the aqueduct ran along the floor of the chamber, and there was a round iron cover over an opening on top of the aqueduct. “Ah!” Regin pretended to slip on the wet and somewhat slimy floor of the tunnel. “Stay here,” he turned to the nearest guard and jabbed a finger at the floor. “I don’t need you clumsy oafs falling and knocking me over.”

  “But, Your Grace, we are responsible for inspecting the-”

  “Which you were not doing at all until I forced you to get off your lazy behinds!” Regin retorted vehemently. “The crown princess is my future daughter-in-law and I am taking responsibility for her safety while she graciously offers me hospitality in the royal palace. Now, stay here while I check the lock on this cover. When I am done, you two blind idiots can fumble around uselessly as you wish but until then, stay out of my way,” Duke Falco demanded with a sneer. The play-acting came easy to him, it was how he treated the guards at his own castle in Burwyck, except for a very trusted few who had earned his grudging respect and trust over the years.

  “Yes, Your Grace,” the guard agreed reluctantly, and remained in place while the duke made his way down the sloping tunnel, holding a lantern with one hand and using the other hand to steady himself on the slick floor.

  Regin made a show of slipping on the floor than was really only damp from moisture seeping between the bricks of th
e tunnel roof, scraping his boot heels to the side and grunting in mock frustration. When the guards did come down the tunnel to inspect the security of the aqueduct cover, he wanted them to move slowly, to delay them looking at the lock mechanism.

  The circular iron cover had a simple bar across it, holding it in place, and a lock on one end of the bar. Tampering with the lock would achieve nothing, for even if the lock were not there at all, the bar was still under two hoops and anyone on the other side of the cover had no way to slide the bar aside. Regin stood huddled over the lock, pretending he was looking at it closely, keeping his body between the two iron hoops and the pair of guards who were holding their lanterns stretched out in front of them to better see what the duke was doing. Working quickly and with shaking hands, Regin pulled from inside his jacket a vial given to him by an agent of the enemy. “The lock is rusted, this is disgraceful,” he remarked as he removed the stopper from the glass vial and poured out the clear liquid in four places; where the bases of the iron hoops met the stone they were set into. The liquid dried rapidly, in seconds the surface appeared no more damp than anything in the underground chamber. Dismayed, Regin caught a whiff of an acrid smell but that, too, was quickly gone, lost in the overall mildewed odor of the tunnels. Satisfied he had performed his task as part of the bargain with Acedor, and with hands shaking from fear, he walked back up the tunnel, this time not having to pretend his unsteadiness. “Well?” He demanded. “Get on with it, you lazy slugs! I don’t have all day!”

  Regin allowed himself a smile, concealed in the darkness, as the two unfortunate guards skidded down the tunnel to peer at and pour oil into the rusty lock. The men only gave the iron cover, bar and hoops a brief glance before hurrying back to the duke. “It is done, Your Grace. Thank you for noting the rust on the lock, we will mention it to the royal engineers.”

  “Mmm,” Regin grunted haughtily, and groaned to himself. He had been working for hours in damp, unpleasant, slimy tunnels just to drip the contents of the vial on that particular area. Now he must continue to uselessly wander the warren of tunnels for another hour, at least, while his fine boots became crusted with dried muck and his stomach grumbled with hunger.

  No, he told himself. Additional time spent in the tunnels was not useless, far from it. By laboriously inspecting all the access points below the palace, he would throw suspicion away from himself if anything unusual and unfortunate were to happen in one of the tunnels.

  Trust no one, Regin reminded himself. One thing he was certain of was that the enemy, above all, could not be trusted.

  “Do you know what they did to me?” Koren asked. “All of it?”

  “As you only recently told me your real name, I do not really know anything about you, Koren,” Bjorn emphasized the last word. “So, no, I don’t know your story, because you haven’t told me. Or you haven’t told me the truth, or all of it.”

  “If you did know, you would understand,” Koren answered defensively.

  “Koren,” the former King’s Guard said with a sigh, “I pledged to follow you to the end of your journey, whatever that is, but I wish you paused to put some thought into exactly what you plan to do once we reach Linden. You told me the Royal Army has orders to kill you, what makes you think Linden is the place you should go? It seems to me you should be running in the other direction.”

  “No!” Koren said vehemently. “No more running,” he shook his head with fierce determination. “I’ve been running away from my problems for too long. My father told me,” he stopped as a lump formed in his throat. “My father,” he took a sip from his water flask, “told me never to mope around and feel sorry for myself, that someone out there,” he waved to the mountains towering around them, “has it worse than you. I haven’t been feeling sorry for myself, at least,” he thought back to when he tried and failed to throw himself over the side of the Lady Hildegard when he thought his jinx curse had followed him to sea and was going to sink the ship. He had to admit, he had been feeling plenty miserably sorry for himself before he worked up the courage to jump over the side. “At least, I stop when I realize that I am feeling sorry for myself. I’m not guilty of that, but I also have not been standing up for myself.”

  “Koren, you didn’t know that you are a wizard,” Bjorn reminded him gently.

  “I’m not talking about that. I should be a knight. Twice over! Three times!” He shouted, shaking a fist at the sky.

  “A knight?” Bjorn worked to keep the skepticism from his face. Judging by Koren’s expression, Bjorn was not successful.

  “I saved the life of the princess, did you know that? I saved her life three times in one morning.” He told the story to Bjorn, who listened with amazement, so much that he needed to look down at where he placed his feet as they walked, lest his attention wander and he fell over the edge.

  “Koren, I had not heard that story. Well, hmm, maybe part of it. My mind was often much addled by drink back then, you remember, so I don’t recall much of the tales I heard. If I did hear such a tale, I would have thought it no more than idle tavern gossip. Truthfully, if I didn’t know you, I would not believe it. It happened just like you said?” The idea of a boy rescuing the crown princess from a giant bear, a raging river and a pack of bandits was ridiculous, except Koren was no ordinary boy. He was a wizard. According to the dwarf woman Frieda, Koren must be an extraordinarily powerful wizard.

  After a pause to consider seriously whether he had embellished a story that needed no exaggeration, Koren nodded. “Just like I said.”

  “Well,” Bjorn let out a breath. “That is surely quite a thing you did. A knighthood would not be out of the question, certainly,” Bjorn mused, although thinking to himself that if Koren had been wearing the uniform of the Royal Army or the King’s Guard, what the boy did that morning might simply be considered doing his duty. “But I do not think you would get three knighthoods for saving her three times. It was, after all, part of the same event-”

  “No, Bjorn. You don’t understand. Saving her that morning was one thing I did. You heard about the Cornerstone being found?”

  “Aye, that I did hear about. Everyone heard about that. Why, I got a free drink the night that news reached the town where I was staying, the tavern keeper was so happy to hear about it.” For a moment, Bjorn thought blissfully back to that free drink, the mellow whiskey hitting his tongue, the warm sensation of- he shook his head angrily. No. He did not drink any longer, and did not want to think fondly in any way of those days. Drinking had cost him his family, his health and his pride.

  “The story you heard was that the princess herself found the Cornerstone?” Koren asked with a neutral expression.

  Bjorn looked to the sky, pulling to the surface a dim memory. “Yes, yes, that is what we heard. She is a clever girl, our princess,” he smiled. “Though now I suppose we have to call her the Regent, which seems a crazy notion to m-”

  “It wasn’t Ariana who found the Cornerstone,” Koren interrupted, lifting his head with pride. “I did it, All by myself. I did it! Her mother and the wizard persuaded me we needed to let people think it was Ariana’s doing, because that would strengthen her position against the Regency Council. Or something like that,” Koren was now bitter about agreeing to keep silent about that lie.

  “You found the Cornerstone?” Bjorn’s voice carried no trace of disbelief, he was beyond that. Nothing the young wizard had done could surprise Bjorn Jihnsson any longer. “The princess took credit for it herself?” If true, that would surprise Bjorn. Though, he admitted to himself, it had been a long time since he last saw the princess with his own eyes. The girl had grown up surrounded by war and strife and the Regency Council’s political machinations to control her. A young woman who faced those threats every day could become very practical about bolstering her own power.

  “No. Or,” he recalled, “she told me she didn’t want to take credit for it, that I should have been given, something for it. Maybe that was another lie,” he choked on the word. A po
werful wizard lying to Koren made him angry, but Koren had never been anything but a servant to the court wizard. Certainly, Ariana was his princess and future sovereign, but she had also been his friend. Or she had pretended to be. Why else had she invited him to read books and study maps of exotic lands with her? As princess, she gained nothing from spending time with the wizard’s servant boy, so had she truly been his friend back then? Or, Koren dared not hope, more than a friend?

  No.

  It didn’t matter. That was all behind him now, all behind both of them now. Ariana was, to everyone’s astonishment, Regent of the land. And more astonishing, she was engaged to be married to, of all people, Kyre Falco. Most astonishing of all, Koren himself was a wizard!

  He admitted to himself that, regarding the crown princess, he did not know what to think. His quarrel was not with her, even if she had known all along that Koren was a wizard. If Lord Salva had advised Regent Carlana Trehayme that the secret had to be kept from Koren, then perhaps Ariana had not been told. Or, she had been told, and all the time they had spent together had not been about friendship at all; it had been the future queen’s attempt to curry favor with a future wizard.

  Koren did not know what to think, other than that while Lord Salva’s betrayal made him angry, a betrayal by Ariana would cut him deeply. The thought was too sad to bear.

  “Koren? Koren!” Bjorn interrupted the boy’s daydreaming.

  “Hmm? Sorry, I was, thinking.”