Quillifer

by Walter Jon Williams

  “Thus, boy,” said Burgoyne, “your chase is brought to an end.” His accent was that of northern Bonille.

  I gasped, my heart thrashing in its cage, then drew in a breath and called out. “Reward for the murderer!”

  He snarled at me, his teeth flashing yellow in his beard. “Pursue me further and I’ll murder you in truth.”

  I saw an old bottle lying by the path, and I bent and flung it at him. He dodged it with an easy, contemptuous shift of his hips. Next to me was a tumbled-down stone wall, once a part of a shed, and I bent to pick up a stone. Burgoyne turned and vanished down the Saelle embankment.

  For an instant, I readied myself to chase again, and then I thought that he might lurk just around the corner of the last building before the embankment, waiting for me to run into range of his rapier. I looked at the old shed on my left, with its broken wall and half-fallen roofbeams. I put my dagger in my teeth—an expedient I would have found ridiculous had I seen it in one of Blackwell’s plays—and I jumped atop the half-fallen wall, and hoisted myself from thence to the roofbeams. I jumped along the beams, the shed shaking under my weight, and then leaped from there to the moldy old thatch of an ancient, decrepit house. My footfalls nearly silent on the straw, I rustled across the roof’s ridge, then down the other side.

  I saw that my shouts and the promise of reward had brought out some of the more enterprising inhabitants of the district, men rough and dubious, and some of these stood at the end of Ramscallion Lane, looking along the side of the building on which I stood. It was no great deduction on my part to conclude that their neighbor Burgoyne stood there.

  I ventured to peer over the edge of the roof, and I saw from above Burgoyne’s broad hat at the corner of the building. He was, as I suspected, at the corner, waiting for me to come dashing around to be skewered like a capon. I disappointed him, apparently, because the hat bent as he peered around the corner and failed to see me. Then he turned and appeared in plain sight, walking toward Ramscallion Lane with his rapier still in his hand.

  He called to his neighbors. “D’ye see that troublesome urchin anywhere?” Some of them looked up at me on the thatch, and I knew he’d follow their glance and realize I was above him; and so I snatched the dagger out of my teeth and leaped.

  I landed behind and to his left side, near enough that I fell into him and knocked him toward the river, but more importantly, I’d brought the pommel of the dagger down on top of his head as I came down. His hat protected his crown somewhat, but he was dazed, and when I rose from the crouch into which the fall had sent me, I was on him, my left hand clutched around his coat collar while my right struck again with the hilt of the dagger. As long as I stayed close, he couldn’t use the rapier.

  I did not want to stab him. It was clear Burgoyne was a hireling merely, and I wanted to haul him before a magistrate for interrogation, and have him reveal the source of the conspiracy.

  As I pummeled my quarry, I could hear shouts of joy from the Ramscallions in the lane. I’m sure they loved nothing so much as a fight.

  Burgoyne managed to fend off most of my blows as I wrenched him around by his collar, shaking him as a terrier shakes a rat. He tried to strike with the hilt of the rapier, but I parried with my own weapon, and cut a gash in his overcoat sleeve. I smashed at his head again and was warded off. I know not what happened next, but somehow he twisted under me, I felt a hand grasp my left wrist, and suddenly I was tumbling through the air.

  I landed on my back with some force, but panic picked me from the ground and rolled me forward to my feet. Plain murder gleamed pale in his eyes. My heart sank as I realized that he could now use his rapier, and I leaped back and parried with the knife as the narrow blade sprang for my vitals. He charged on and I skipped away, out into Ramscallion Lane, with our audience scattering as the blades gleamed in the day’s dull light.

  Burgoyne paused in his pursuit as he gasped for breath. I pointed at him.

  “Reward!” I cried. “Reward for the murderer!”

  Burgoyne snarled and lunged at me again, and I danced away. We were in a growing half circle of observers, men and women and laughing children. Anticipation, cruelty, and greed shone in their eyes, as if we were dogs fighting in a pit for their entertainment. I pointed again.

  “Knock him down!” said I. “Throw rocks! Throw bottles! Trip him up! There’s a reward!”

  “How much?” asked some pragmatist. A young man hurled a bottle, and it whistled past Burgoyne’s head. He glared at his neighbor and mouthed a curse.

  More bottles followed, and pans, and stones. A slop pot, hurled from an upper storey, landed at his feet and spattered him with its contents. I had turned the neighborhood into my accomplices. Burgoyne fended off most of the missiles, but they slowed him down, and then one caught him on the forehead. After that, blood poured into his eyes, and he had to keep wiping them.

  I could see the resolve building in him, and so I was ready when he made another attempt to kill me, running at me with the sword thrusting for my heart—and I would have got away if the growing crowd hadn’t hampered me. Suddenly, I was within range of the blade, and I frantically twisted away from it as it plucked at the buttons of my leather riding jerkin. I stabbed at him with my knife, and felt the blade enter the right shoulder. And then one of the crowd failed to get out of the way in time, and I tripped over him and fell. . . . And there I was, helpless as the killer stood over me with growing triumph in his eyes. His arm came back for the final thrust.

  At which point the thief-taker Toland, who had come up through the crowd, swung his cudgel, and caught Burgoyne behind the ear, and so laid out the murderer atop me.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  * * *

  he high-ribbed timber ceiling, which resembled nothing so much as a ship inverted, echoed to the chanting of monks. Smoke dulled the fitful light. The air was scented with burning charcoal and the searing stench of white-hot metal.

  “It sorrows me to say this,” said His Grace of Roundsilver. “But I think it best if you stayed away from court for the present.”

  I felt defiance straighten my spine. “I have done nothing wrong,” said I. “I have in fact done the Queen a service. Why should I hide?”

  “The whole world knows of the Queen’s distaste for your presence,” said Roundsilver. “Should you appear at court, any who hope for royal favor will be obliged to shun you. It will be humiliating, and will do your cause no good.”

  I thought for a long moment. Anger boomed dully in my veins. “I understand,” said I.

  “Other matters will soon occupy the court’s attention. After that, you may return.”

  The duchess looked up at me, her blue eyes deep with compassion. “I warned you, did I not, that you should think before you acted?”

  “A court conspiracy,” said the duke, “is sometimes better left unmasked. If you meant to help Broughton, you failed. If you meant to uncover the guilty, you succeeded all too well. The Queen was forced to take action, and well does she resent you for making her take notice of the intrigue at her court.”

  After capturing Burgoyne, Toland and I had taken the renegade knight to a magistrate, accompanied by a pack of the inhabitants of Ramscallion Lane. The sheriff’s men turned out, not because of the prisoner, but because they thought a riot was about to begin.

  While Burgoyne was marched to jail, I led the mob to one of the countinghouses where I kept my funds. At the sight of this pack of unruly stew-dwellers, the good bankers began locking doors and slamming shutters, certain they were about to be stormed by an angry rabble. It took a bit of negotiation, but eventually I was allowed inside to collect some of my silver, after which I paid the mob to go away.

  That same morning, before leaving Kingsmere for the capital, the Queen had appointed Lord Slaithstowe to be the new Attorney General, and put the investigation into his hands. Slaithstowe rode ahead of the Queen’s party and arrived late in the afternoon to find Burgoyne already in custody.

  The Que
en in the interim announced a reward of three hundred royals to the person capturing the fugitive, again without knowing that Burgoyne had been taken.

  The next day Slaithstowe spent in putting the assassin to the question before the Court of the Siege Royal and coercing him to name his accomplices. What Slaithstowe heard probably had him tearing his beard out by the roots, but he did his duty, copied the transcript of the interrogation in his own hand—not trusting anyone else—and reported to the Queen first thing the next morning.

  For Burgoyne admitted that he was in the pay of both Leonora, the Queen’s own mother, and her best friend, the Countess of Coldwater. Each rejoiced in her nearness to the Queen, and both feared losing the Queen’s love to the interloper Broughton—and in addition Leonora, for reasons of policy, favored Berlauda’s marriage to Loretto’s prince and heir, rather than to a minor viscount with a pretty face.

  The countess’s father, old Coldwater, had been Burgoyne’s liege-lord. Burgoyne’s service in foreign wars had allowed him to return to Duisland with a competence but, being a rake and gambler, he had lost it all. The Countess gave him a few crowns now and again and kept him in reserve, in case she needed someone to intercept a messenger or cut a throat. And then came the inspiration to kill Broughton’s wife and blame the husband for the deed. It was one of the Countess’s ladies who commissioned the dagger with the Broughton badge.

  Queen Berlauda must have been appalled and devastated by the news, but she lacked neither courage nor resolution. Burgoyne was sent to the gallows that very day. The Countess of Coldwater was ordered to Coldwater House on the northeast coast, there to await the Queen’s pleasure; and Queen Leonora was sent to the royal residence and fort at West Moss, beyond the Minnith Peaks, and as far from the capital as it is possible to travel without actually wading out into the ocean.

  As for Broughton, the scandal was too great for a man without powerful friends to survive. Though he was innocent of anything but ambition, he was obliged to resign his post as Master of the Hunt, given the new office of Inspector General of Fortifications, and sent off to view and report on the state of every fort, castle, and city wall in the kingdom. And, as he had borrowed heavily to outfit himself as a great man at court, and to provide the entertainments at Kingsmere, he would be pursued on this pilgrimage by his creditors, or their representatives.

  Whether Lady Broughton rejoiced in the return of her husband, I do not know.

  An official announcement was made that Burgoyne had been hanged after an attempt to assassinate the Queen. No mention was made of the Countess or Queen Leonora, though everyone at court knew the story within hours. Presumably the bastard Clayborne, when he read the despatches of his spies, was greatly entertained by the affair.

  Those responsible for the violence were punished, but the punishment did not stop there, for Berlauda deeply resented losing everyone she loved and trusted, and viewed without charity those who had brought her this intelligence. She could not abide the sight of Lord Slaithstowe, and found the pain of his presence too much to bear. He kept his office less than a week, which must have been a great blow, as he had performed his duty as well as it could be done—and he lost also the sweeteners he would have been paid by anyone whose business brought them before the Attorney General, a sum that would over time have been a great fortune. Instead, he was appointed Commissioner of the Royal Dockyard in Amberstone, where the opportunities for enrichment were small by comparison.

  And as for me—I, who had been the subject of praise and the object of envy after my capture of Burgoyne—I was told merely that the sight of me was disagreeable to her majesty, and that I should avoid her royal presence. Unlike Slaithstowe, I was not offered a job, lest the offer be construed as a reward rather than a punishment.

  I wondered if Virtue had triumphed over Iniquity, as in Blackwell’s masque. Berlauda’s court had been cleansed of one conspirator and one adulterous nobleman, but no doubt there were many of that sort who remained. The court was also rid of one half-lawyer who trusted too much to his own luck, and had suffered the consequence of that trust. I could almost hear the laughter as it echoed from the great roof beams of the foundry.

  Was it Virtue who laughed in her chaste home, or was the laughter that of her demicolleague, Iniquity?

  I still waited for the three hundred royals promised for Burgoyne. If I ever received it, I would divide it evenly between Toland, Merton’s family, and Ethlebight’s fund for redeeming prisoners.

  At least the Roundsilvers did not shun my company—they moved in a circle so grand that the whims of the monarch barely mattered. I had been invited to the foundry at Innismore where the duke intended to cast his two great siege cannons, and if I had not been so angry at Berlauda and her court, I might have found it interesting. Instead, I found the business intolerable.

  The twenty-four monks, who sat in a gallery built specially for them, sat with their backs to us, so the purity of their hearts and prayers would not be distracted by the activities of the profane. Their droning was maddening, like that of an audience bored with the play, and I felt like an actor on the stage before that audience. So frustrated and miserable was I that I wondered if my mere presence would negate weeks of chanting.

  Nearer at hand, the engineer Ransome and the Abbot Ambrosius, who I had met at that dinner at the Roundsilver Palace, competed with one another in smug self-satisfaction. Rather than listen to them, I kept my mind on the details of the casting.

  The cannons had been first created in wax, tons of the stuff molded into vast effigies that modeled the great guns in every detail, from the cascabel to the chase. Also modeled were the many ornaments, from the royal arms, the royal cypher BR, the handles in the shape of leaping dolphins, the laurels of victory that gracefully twined the breech, the images of old gods hurling thunderbolts, and goddesses puffing out their cheeks to blow the cannonball toward its enemy, the inscription and date ascribing the casting of the cannon to the duke, and sorcerous formulae that promised strength and destructive power. The duke had not abandoned his worship of Beauty, even in so deadly an instrument as a cannon.

  The effigies had been packed in clay and then heated, so that the wax melted and ran out, leaving a hardened clay mold behind. The molds were set upright in a pit, near the great crucibles that held the molten bronze.

  Ransome urged us to withdraw so that we would not be spattered with hot metal when the pour began. He had been bustling over the last hour, supervising the melting metal, sprinkling his alchemical powders into the crucible. I drew back and found myself standing next to a white-haired man in a worn leather jerkin and a cloth bonnet that bagged out about his ears, and failed to entirely conceal his baldness.

  “If yon fellow scurries much faster,” he said as he nodded at Ransome, “he may accidentally leave behind his conceit.”

  “Or the cannon may crack. That will dent his vanity.”

  He shook his pointed white beard. “If the cannon cracks, he will blame the monks. One of them may have harbored an impure thought or two during in the last twenty-odd days, sure, and spoiled the spell.”

  The man had the accent of the northwest, with its lilt and lolling r’s. I looked at him.

  “Do you work here at the foundry?” asked I.

  “Nay. I am a master cannoneer. I represent the guild, which requires that one of its masters be present at the creation of every gun destined for the royal armory.”

  In my rambles about the city, I had passed by the hall of the Loyall and Worshipfull Companie of Cannoneers, and marked the sheer aggression of its facade, with genuine if venerable pieces of artillery mounted on the roof parapets, and aimed casually down the street, or at neighboring houses.

  “I have seen your guild hall,” said I. “I know of no other hall that so successfully threatens an entire neighborhood.”

  He grinned at me with crooked, yellow teeth. “We are a formidable crew, to be sure. No element of a contract goes unenforced.”

  “I shall exami
ne your contract carefully, then, should I ever require some artillery.”

  “Ah! Look! Something is afoot.”

  Abbot Ambrosius walked purposefully to the monks, sat in front of them—facing both the monks and the rest of the building—and in silence signaled for a change in the chant. The monks began a new incantation, raising their voices to echo more forcefully off the great wooden beams of the ceiling.

  The alchemist Ransome hardly waited for the new chant before he waved an arm to begin the pour. The foundry’s journeymen tipped the great crucible, and ninety hundredweight of brilliant, white-hot bronze poured into a channel that led straight to the cannon’s mouth. Smoke, steam, and sparks shot upward, and there was a growling dragon’s roar as superheated air began to hiss from the channels of the clay mold. I held out a hand to shield my eyes from the glare.

  Bronze filled the matrix and began to overspill from the funnel-shaped depression on the end of the mold. Sparks danced on the foundry floor. Ransome gave a shout and a wave, and the journeymen returned the crucible to its upright position and began throwing into it ingots of copper, tin, and zinc, all in proportions to Ransome’s alchemical formula. Other apprentices readied themselves to shift the channels so that the next pour would be directed into the matrix of the second gun.

  The monks lowered their voices and began a less strident chant. It would be hours before the cannon cooled, and some time before the metal intended for the second gun was ready, and so I congratulated the duke and duchess on their new destructive power, and left the foundry’s blazing heat for the crisp November day outside.

  The wan winter sun hung over the yardarms of the ships clustered at Innismore’s wharves. The air was filled with the scents of tar, smoke, and the abundant richness of the flowing tide. From somewhere, over the cry of gulls, I could hear the clack of capstan pawls along with the song and stamp of a chantey and the cheerful song of a pennywhistle.

  At the sights and sounds of the harbor I felt the onset of a great homesickness, and suddenly I yearned to be in Ethlebight. I had done what I could for my city during my stay in the capital, and could do no more. I could not advance here, and I might as well be home.