King of Bryanae

by Jeffrey Getzin

“Call her off, Gianelli,” Four Fingers wailed. “Call her off!”

  She circled clockwise, and now she and the Chancellor had the King flanked again. With one hand holding the knife to Four Fingers's throat, there would be no way the King could fend off both of them.

  The Chancellor said nothing but walked menacingly toward the King, snorting though his nostrils.

  “By all the Hells, Gianelli,” Four Fingers said. “I’ve taken precautions. If I die, you die, too!”

  The Chancellor halted, shaking his head as if to free himself from his berserk rage.

  Willow lunged at the King once more, but he wrapped his arm around Four Fingers’s throat and rolled, interposing Four Fingers between them. Every time Willow adjusted her position, the King adjusted his so that Four Fingers was in front. She considered the possibility of thrusting through Four Fingers and into the King.

  “Gianelli!” Four Fingers cried desperately. “If I die, you die! You’ll be dead by morning!”

  The Chancellor shook his head a moment more, and then grumbled, “Stop, Willow.”

  Immediately, she withdrew a step but kept her rapier at the ready. She eyed the Chancellor, awaiting further instructions.

  “Have Gianelli order her to protect me,” the King said.

  “Gianelli!”

  The Chancellor sighed in frustration and disgust.

  “Do it,” he said.

  Ah, better.

  Willow jumped past Four Fingers and interposed herself between the Chancellor and the King, her rapier held low.

  “Tell her to disregard any further orders until sun-up tomorrow,” the King said.

  “Why, you—!” The Chancellor took a step toward the King, raising his axe, but Willow brought her rapier in line with his throat. The Chancellor stepped back again.

  “Do it,” the King said again, pressing his knife against Four Fingers’s back.

  “Gianelli—” Four Fingers started to say, but the Chancellor interrupted him.

  “I heard him, damn him to all the hells.” Addressing Willow, he said, “Willow, disregard any further orders from me until sun-up tomorrow.”

  “I’m disarmed!” Four Fingers cried. “I’m disarmed!”

  “Ah,” said the King, suddenly at ease. “That’s so much better, don’t you think?”

  He climbed off Four Finger’s back and offered him a hand up. The dwarf slapped the hand away and clambered to his feet on his own.

  The moment Four Fingers was clear, the Chancellor shouted: “Kill him, Willow!”

  Willow did not move.

  “I’m sorry, Chancellor,” she said, not feeling sorry at all. “Just following your orders.”

  “Why did you come here, D’Arbignal?” Four Fingers said wearily. He shambled toward a chair, holding a hand to the wound by his kidney. “What have I ever done to you?”

  “You know,” D’Arbignal said with a smile, “it’s funny you should ask.”

  Chapter 52

  “Whatever you need to ask him,” Willow said, “you’d better ask it quickly, Your Majesty.”

  D’Arbignal was attending to Four Fingers’s wounds, washing them with a strong spirit he had found at the room’s bar. The dwarf moaned and yelped. Personally, Willow wouldn’t have stopped to help him, but it wasn’t her decision to make.

  “Why does she keep calling you that?” Four Fingers asked. He sounded weary and resigned to his loss. The fight was gone from his eyes. "You're not King Eric."

  “Yes,” the Chancellor growled, “stop calling him that; you know he's not the King.”

  “Sorry, sir, but you’ll need to tell me that again after sun-up tomorrow,” Willow said.

  The Chancellor snarled. He hurled his hand-axe across the room, where it ended up embedded in the exotic wood paneling.

  “Thanks for that, Gianelli,” Four Fingers said dryly.

  “Listen,” D’Arbignal said, “we have more important things to discuss, you and I. I’m told that not so much as an apple is stolen from a fruit cart in this city without your permission.”

  Four Fingers half-smiled.

  “I couldn’t give a shit about apples,” he said. Then he yelped.

  “Sorry,” D’Arbignal said. “I must have tied the tourniquet a little too tightly. It’s a problem I’ve had ever since I was a child: sarcasm just makes me careless. But I’m sorry, you were saying something…?”

  “All right, all right,” Four Fingers whined. “This is the worst party I’ve ever thrown.”

  He took a deep breath.

  “Yes,” he said. “I know what goes on in the city, all right?”

  Willow peeked out the door into the hallway. Eight guards had assembled at the end of the hall and were discussing tactics, gesturing her way.

  “Hurry, Your Majesty,” she said, pleased at how calm her voice sounded despite how spectacularly badly this night had gone.

  D’Arbignal pulled Four Fingers toward him, and stared into his eyes. Their noses were only inches apart.

  “So if I wanted to have something particularly nasty done, such as—oh, say, maybe having a young girl’s face horribly burned—I’d come to talk to you, right?”

  Willow froze in momentary astonishment. A girl with a horribly burned face? She had met her, hadn’t she? At the circus! What was her name, Maria? Yes, that was it. She had been the owner of the Venucha Players.

  Four Fingers’s eyes widened. “Is that what this is all about, some slut who ran away from home?”

  D’Arbignal considered Four Fingers’s hands, a thoughtful expression on his face. “Your name doesn’t suit you, Mr. Fingers. I can remedy that.”

  “Okay, okay!” Four Fingers said, curling his hands into tiny fists. “Yes! Yes! The kid’s father came to me, but I didn’t do anything. I just put him in touch with a guy.”

  “Which brings me nicely to my next question,” D’Arbignal said. “The man who burned her. I’m pretty sure I know who did it, but I’d really like to hear his name from your lips.”

  Fear shone in the dwarf’s eyes, and he just stared back at D’Arbignal.

  “That is,” D’Arbignal said menacingly, “while you still have lips.”

  Four Fingers leaned forward and said something to D’Arbignal that Willow couldn’t make out. When he leaned back again, his face was pale.

  D’Arbignal nodded. “Yes, that’s who I thought.”

  “What are you planning to do about it?” Four Fingers asked. His face was almost completely colorless now, and the whites of his eyes seemed enormous.

  “I haven’t decided. But fear not; whatever I do to him will make your evening feel like a grand success in comparison. But steady now. I have more questions for you.”

  “D’Arbignal,” the Chancellor said, his voice a pitiless monotone, “if Four Fingers doesn’t kill you for this, I certainly will.”

  The Chancellor’s eyes were empty of emotion, but the corners of his lips twitched. Willow had seen that look too many times not to recognize it; the Chancellor had something particularly nasty in store for D’Arbignal.

  “Noted, Gianelli,” D’Arbignal said. To Four Fingers, he said, “The girl in question was to be married to a Bryanaen duke. Which one?”

  “I can’t believe this whole thing is over a girl!” Four Fingers wailed.

  “I’d really appreciate it if you just answered my question, Mr. Fingers,” D’Arbignal said evenly. “It’d make the rest of the evening go ever so smoothly.”

  Four Fingers sighed. “His name is Ledor. Duke Ledor. But he’s not in Bryanae anymore.”

  D’Arbignal extended his hand in a go on gesture.

  “He’s the ambassador to Panineth, sir,” Willow said. “He has a small mansion there.”

  “Splendid!” D’Arbignal said. “Now one last question and you’ll be rid of me for good. Just think: after you’ve answered this question, you’ll never have to see my admittedly very handsome face again.”

  Four Fingers shook his head, no spirit left in him. “Just
get it over with.”

  “Very well,” said D’Arbignal, all smiles. Then he put his face right up to the dwarf’s, and the smile was gone. “What was the girl’s name?”

  “Her name?”

  “Yes, her name. You had a defenseless girl burned horribly, destroying her life. Surely you remember her name.”

  Four Fingers blinked helplessly. His eyes scrunched up in concentration but at length, he shook his head.

  “I’m sorry?” he said.

  D’Arbignal laughed. “Oh, you’ve apologized, so consider the matter settled. No hard feelings.”

  He put his foot against Four Fingers’s chest, and pushed, toppling him and the chair in which he was sitting. Four Fingers yelped, but made no effort to get up.

  D’Arbignal made a quick circuit around the room, stopping at each wall sconce with a torch. He touched the tip of his rapier to the burning torch, and the flames seemed to be … inhaled into the weapon. The room gradually descended into almost complete darkness.

  “I want to thank you for a lovely time, Mr. Fingers. I’ll have to have you over at the castle someday soon. And Gianelli, I can’t tell you how good it is to see you again.” He added sotto vocce to Willow, “Not without lying, anyway.”

  He walked toward the door.

  “Shall we go, Willow?”

  “There are eight guards. Stay back while I dispatch them.”

  D’Arbignal shook his head with a derisive snort. “Come on, Willow! You yourself said it: there are only eight guards out there!”

  He grinned, and reached for the door handle. Willow slapped his hand away. D’Arbignal looked surprised, but then smiled.

  “Right,” he said. “Ladies first.”

  Chapter 53

  “Okay, so there were eleven of them,” D’Arbignal said. “Not eight. We can still handle them, no problem. I’ll take the eleven on the left; you hold on to my hat.”

  The guards by the door had spotted them. After some discussion, one of them stepped forward, brandishing his long sword with obvious trepidation.

  “Is Four Fingers still alive?” he said. There was a sheen of perspiration on his forehead. He wiped it away with his free hand.

  D’Arbignal moved from torch to torch with his rapier, absorbing the flames. As the hall got darker, the guards looked more nervous.

  “You know, I don’t recall,” D’Arbignal said. “Captain, do you remember what I did with Four Fingers? Did we kill him?”

  Willow had neither the skill nor the inclination to participate in what D’Arbignal no doubt thought of as “witty banter.”

  “He’s alive,” she said.

  “You’re not much of a straight man,” he said to her.

  D’Arbignal strolled toward the guards, stopping to extinguish each torch he passed.

  “Oh, that’s right,” he said. “I remember now. He’s the one with all the holes in him.” He added, “Willow, would you be kind enough to hand me that chair?”

  Willow didn’t know what to say. “Chair?”

  “Yes,” D’Arbignal said, pointing at the overstuffed armchair pressed against the wall, “that lovely (and heavy) wooden chair.”

  She lifted the chair in both arms. It was heavy and unwieldy. She staggered over to D’Arbignal with it.

  “This?” she said.

  “That’s the one!”

  D’Arbignal sheathed his magic rapier and took hold of the chair.

  He screamed ferociously and charged the guards, brandishing the chair before him. After only a moment’s shocked hesitation, Willow ran after him.

  The guards backed out of the hallway. Then they turned and fled. They pushed the velvet curtains open and ran onto the landing. They ran out of room at the railing of the staircase; they skidded to a stumbling halt at the rail.

  D’Arbignal ran into them with his chair, causing four of them to topple over the railing. They fell, screaming, to the marble floor below.

  “Sorry!” exclaimed D’Arbignal. “I didn’t see you there!”

  Willow burst through the gap D’Arbignal had made. The remaining guards remained stunned by his surprise charge, so she was able to fell three of them before they even fully realized their danger.

  D’Arbignal toppled the chair over the railing, where it plummeted onto the dead or wounded guards below. It bounced once, and then shattered on the marble floor. A blonde woman shrieked, and then everybody was moving at once, in what seemed random directions.

  D’Arbignal drew his rapier, which had a thin corona of fire surrounding the blade.

  “Only four left,” he remarked. “It hardly seems fair.”

  He moved toward the guards, but Willow was already in motion. She faked toward one, then impaled another one, after which she changed back to her original target and finished him off with a deep lunge.

  “Two left!” he lamented.

  D’Arbignal looked at the remaining pair of guards, trying to decide whom to engage first, but they lost their nerve and fled down the stairs.

  Willow started down the stairs, clearing a path for D’Arbignal to follow. However, he drew back the velvet curtains once more, and tied them off. He re-opened the door into the hallway.

  “Oh, and Four Fingers?” he called down the hall. “Her name is Maria. The girl whose life you ruined is named Maria.”

  With a quick wink to Willow, D’Arbignal vanished back down the hallway. She looked at the door with astonishment.

  “Your Majesty!” she said. “What are you—?”

  D’Arbignal sprinted from the hall. He sprang from the railing, and sailed through the air. Willow’s jaw dropped. She was supposed to be protecting him.

  D’Arbignal collided with the enormous crystal chandelier. The crystals tinkled like an enormous wind-chime web that had trapped the world’s most spastic fly.

  “Your—!” Willow started, but in her astonishment, she forgot what word came next.

  D’Arbignal clung to the chandelier for a moment as it careened back and forth over the main hall. Below him, the partygoers and remaining guards scattered as candles and individual shards of crystal showered onto them.

  “Your Majesty!” Willow shouted, and then she was furious with herself. First, she had let him out of her sight, then she shouted at him uselessly, and finally, she'd loudly revealed his identity at a crime lord’s mansion. Brilliant.

  How in the Hells had she found herself in this situation? She was more incompetent than even Marcus!

  D’Arbignal scaled the chandelier, extinguishing the remaining candles with his rapier.

  “Do you want to see something really exciting, Willow?” he called, laughing gleefully, like a naughty child.

  She struggled to speak for a moment.

  “No!” she managed.

  D’Arbignal laughed. He rode the swinging chandelier, looking like the captain at the helm of a ship riding the stormy seas. He put the tip of his rapier against the chain that fastened the chandelier to the ceiling.

  “The timing’s always a bit difficult,” he said.

  The blade of his rapier shone bright red. The red flowed to the very tip, which flared with a white light too bright for her to look at directly. The chain began to groan. Then it snapped!

  The chandelier plunged toward the marble floor at an angle. As it fell, D’Arbignal crouched, hesitated for a fraction of a second, and then sprang from the chandelier. He hurtled across the open expanse and caught hold of the railing of the staircase opposite the one on which Willow stood.

  The chandelier crashed to the floor and shattered, sending fragments of candles and crystals flying in all directions. The remaining partygoers fled the hall, running out of Four Fingers’s mansion as a panicked mob.

  D’Arbignal climbed the railing and sprinted down his staircase. Willow ran down hers, and they met in the center of the main hall, now devastated and devoid of people.

  “You certainly know how to make an impression, sir,” Willow said dryly. “There won’t be anywhere in the city out
side of the Castle where you’ll be safe. If you think you’ve been kept cooped up until now, wait until we get you back there tonight.”

  D’Arbignal frowned momentarily, then shook it off with a grin. He gestured toward the street and extended his elbow for her to hold.

  “Shall we?” he said.

  She stared at him. He stared back. After a moment, she relented and took his arm.

  “Nice party,” D’Arbignal remarked as they left. “A little dull, but otherwise not bad at all.”

  Chapter 54

  “So this whole thing was about a woman,” Willow said, catching her breath.

  D’Arbignal smiled, and seemed about to reply when the Tower Bell rang off in the distance. Willow held up a hand to indicate that D’Arbignal was to be quiet. He hmphed but fell silent.

  The Tower Bell was used to communicate quickly across the city in the case of emergencies. There was supposed to be a sequence of sounds, silence for a minute, and then the sequence would repeat two more times. The sequence was a code for conveying important events: the death of an important person, a fire or other disaster, an imminent attack from an army, etc. It was never used for anything non-catastrophic.

  The bell rang three times, and then stopped. There was no code that rang three times and stopped.

  “Someone sure likes to—” D’Arbignal started.

  “Quiet!” Willow hissed, and listened.

  D’Arbignal closed his mouth with an audible clack.

  More than a minute passed. The sequence did not repeat.

  “Your Majesty,” she said, “we need to hurry. I think those bells were for you.”

  “I’m glad I’m not the only one who thinks that,” he said, deadpanning. “People look at me oddly when I tell them that bells are only rung for my benefit.” He pointed up, toward the horizon. “Oh, I bet that’s for me, too.”

  Willow looked at where he was pointing. Someone was waving a large torch atop a building. It was clearly a signal, which was disturbing enough in and of itself, but what really bothered her was that it was a different signal. Someone had used the bells to signal something; the bell tower was much too far away for the same party to then get to that other location and wave a torch.