Quillifer the Knight

by Walter Jon Williams

  Heliodor—

  I must thank you for my husband’s life, though I could wish you had not saved him at such an expense to his pride. So humiliating has he found the outcome of his encounter that he has resigned his position as master of the henchmen, and will travel at once to Loretto to take part in King Henrico’s war. There he may recover both his dignity and his fortune.

  I must go with him, for he has no one else, and he believes that even his friends will despise him for the manner of his defeat.

  I must therefore disregard all your advice, though I know it was well intentioned. There is little time, and there is scandal enough without my adding to it.

  You and I must never meet again, for I would not have my husband humiliated once more. I will remember you always, and remember also that you tried to save me from what the world will call my folly.

  Some of my jewelry I may have to pawn, but I wish to return the enclosed. I would rather you keep it than I fail the test, and find myself selling this precious memory in order to meet some debt.

  Yours in sorrow,

  Girasol

  In the small package was the white diamond I had given her as a love-gift, with its silver chain and simple setting. I held it in my clenched fist while I contemplated my own helplessness in all these dealings, and I wondered if I should have told her what I suspected of Westley’s dealings with Wenlock, and if that would have altered her decision.

  For a wild moment I considered riding to her house and pleading with her to fly with me. But no, I thought, I could not swerve her now from the course she had so decided upon, be it ever so unwise.

  And so concluding, I went to my strongbox and laid the diamond to rest in a pouch of velvet black as mourning, and beside it I laid the sun medallion, and as I closed the box, I felt that sun in eclipse, and the world seemed a little darker.

  * * *

  That evening I tried to cheer myself by playing guitar with Master Knott, and as we tuned our instruments, he turned to me. “What you predicted, Sir Quillifer, has come about.”

  “I’m pleased to know of my prescience,” said I. “But what is it that I prophesied?”

  “That someone would come to me and offer money to inform on you.”

  “Ah.” I considered this. “Who was it?”

  “He said his name was Darnley, but I know no more than that.”

  I plucked the D string, found it flat, and gave a twist to the tuning peg. “How much does he offer?”

  “Three crowns per month. More if I report something of great moment.”

  “In that case,” said I. “We shall invent a tale worth the telling. And I will match whatever he pays you.”

  “Thank you, sir. That is very generous.”

  I gave the matter more thought, and then said, “Try to find out if Darnley is paying anyone else in the household.”

  Knott nodded. “Very good, sir.”

  “And now,” said I, “let us play.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The next day, Lady Westley’s plight filling my mind with a storm of anger and despair, I went to the House of Burgesses and watched the proceedings from the narrow gallery. The peers met in a ramshackle old palace, but the Burgesses met in the former great hall of Howel College, built before the college became a part of the great King’s University built on the watery meads east of the city. The gallery had been added in recent decades, and it creaked and groaned beneath the weight of the spectators. High windows brought in the dull winter light, and old tapestries, blackened and worn, draped the walls.

  The chain of my office and a vail to one of the porters gained me a good seat, and I found myself near Sir Denys Hulme, the chancellor of the exchequer. Before he gained his peerage he had sat among the Burgesses and overseen the king’s business there, but now as Baron Hulme he could not speak in the Burgesses, and had to manage them through a deputy. But because the passage of Berlauda’s new taxes was crucial, more here than in the other house, he sat in the gallery of the Burgesses, and communicated with his deputy through notes carried by a messenger.

  Because Their Majesties also viewed the Burgesses as of primary importance, they tended the day’s business themselves, from beneath the canopy of state they had set up at the head of the chamber. They wore their ermine-trimmed robes of state, and Priscus wore a gold circlet about his dark head, while Berlauda had a small crown perched atop her blond hair.

  For myself, I hoped that the Burgesses would raise money for the relief of Ethlebight and the other districts ravaged by the summer storm. For the war and the raising of palaces I cared little.

  The session began, however, with a wrangle over the delicate matter of free speech. For the members begged leave of Their Majesties to speak freely before the throne, a liberty which the co-sovereigns were reluctant to grant. “We do not grant liberty to cause us offense,” said the queen.

  “We pray the truth cannot offend Your Majesties,” said the spokesman for the Burgesses. He was a dark-visaged, scowling man from Selford, a rich silk merchant named Umbrey.

  “We will be the judge of truth!” said Priscus. His face had turned scarlet with anger, and his hands clenched into fists. He was no longer the pleasant king with his caw-caw-caw, but an autocrat, raised to rule a nation where no one contradicted the monarch and lived. “The Blessed Pilgrim has given unto us the mastery of the state, the courts, and the Estates,” he said, “and there is no greater judge in the land than we ourselves.”

  “The Pilgrim then give you the wisdom to judge wisely,” said Umbrey.

  Priscus understood this as defiance. “You desire liberty?” he said. “We give you the liberty to say ‘ay,’ or to say ‘nay.’ ”

  Umbrey looked over the assembly and saw crackling resentment rise in the Burgesses at this curt treatment, and he folded his arms. “In that case, Majesty,” said he, “we may call for the vote now, and see whether the result pleaseth you.”

  Next to me in the gallery Hulme wrote frantically on a wax tablet and, without bothering to summon his messenger, tossed it below to Sir Edmund Tryon, his deputy in the Burgesses. Who then rose and, begging Their Majesties’ permission to speak, began an attempt to redirect the storm that had built in the chamber.

  “Why should Their Majesties consent aforetime to slander and derogation?” he said. “We of the Burgesses are honored by the royal presence, and the demands by mannerless rudesbys to offend the dignity of the house by baying their coarse opinions in this sacred chamber are an insult to all members.”

  “As we speak of slander and derogation,” Umbrey said, “perhaps the honorable member would care to name these mannerless rudesbys?”

  Tryon ignored the interruption. “Their Majesties desire naught but decency and order,” he said. “There is no intention to forbid speech, but rather to keep the speech on point. We are summoned to this house on urgent business that is confronting all Duisland. So I beg Their Majesties to grant liberty of speech on the matter of the bill placed before the house, but to forbid distraction, disorder, and insult.”

  Berlauda, too, had sensed the danger that might result from a revolt of the commons, and was relieved to be offered an alternative.

  “This we grant right willingly,” she said. Her husband glowered, but said nothing.

  Another member rose. I recognized him as the silver-haired Sir Cecil Greene, from my own city of Ethlebight, who had served as lord mayor and long been an alderman alongside my father. He was an apothecary, but a rich one, for he owned property and loaned money on merchant ventures.

  “Your Majesties,” he said, “and honorable members of the house, I wish to say that I have studied the bill that is brought before us, and I desire to say before Their Majesties that insufficient monies are allocated for the relief of the victims of the summer’s great storm. Their Majesties desire that we raise and victual an army of twenty thousand men, but more than twenty thousand of our own people—men, women, and babes—will starve this winter if they have not succor. I
remind the honorable members that the storm was nearly four months ago, and precious little aid has been given in the time since, even as the price of a loaf of cheat bread has risen to two pence.”

  Tryon responded that the crown would entertain a greater sum for the relief of the districts afflicted by the storm, but that this should be voted after the bill now placed before the house. Greene respectfully disagreed, and Umbrey rose to support him. “For it should not be said,” he observed, “that the care of Their Majesties’ own subjects should take second place to a war against a people far away, who have done us no harm, and with whom our trade is worth four hundred thousand royals every year.”

  King Priscus still burned with anger. “And how much for the honor of the nation?” he demanded. “How much is that!”

  The spokesmen for the Burgesses wisely did not offer an answer, and the debate continued. It became apparent that Umbrey, Greene, and others in the leadership were determined to debate the bill clause by clause, and that the Burgesses would revisit the debate on carucage, ship money, and the salt tax that had been so thoroughly disputed during the last war.

  Other Burgesses spoke loudly in favor of the war and the bill. They expressed no strong conviction against Thurnmark, but seemed in favor of war generally, and it mattered not against who. It was as if the army was like their favorite jouster, and they wished to see that jouster trample his rivals no matter what colors they wore. War was a great jubilant sport to them, an entertainment that they wished to enjoy, particularly if they could enjoy it from the safety of the House of Burgesses.

  After listening to a few of this faction’s speeches, I decided that if someone made a motion in North Howel to invade South Howel and kill all the inhabitants there, at least a fifth of the population would cheer for the idea.

  After some hours the Burgesses rose for dinner, and a messenger in the cap and gown of an apprentice lawyer approached me. “Sir Quillifer,” he said, “Lord Edevane hopes to speak with you.”

  “I am happy to wait upon his lordship,” said I, and followed the messenger across the square to the House of Peers. Berlauda’s private secretary I found in a small, crowded office lit by beeswax candles, with his peer’s scarlet robes hanging behind him on a stand clearly made for the purpose. Edevane himself was gazing pensively at papers, his spectacles drawn down his nose, and he made a note on one of the papers before rising to greet me.

  “How went the Burgesses?” he asked.

  I looked into the dead-fish eyes while I considered an answer. “I think it may be a long winter,” I said finally.

  “There is ever a want of goodwill in the Burgesses,” Edevane said. “Yet it will be managed, one way or another.”

  The image of those two heads before the Hall of Justice came to my mind, and I wondered what sort of managing Edevane intended.

  Edevane sat again behind his desk, and he gestured me toward a stool standing by a cabinet. “I apologize for the scant comfort,” he said in his soft voice. “Yet I can offer you a cushion.”

  “I thank your lordship.” Placing the cushion on the stool elevated me somewhat, so that my knees were not quite level with my ears, and Edevane looked down at me with an expression of mild satisfaction, as if he desired me to know that I was below him, in life as in his office.

  “I wished to say that I think you handled wisely the encounter with Sir Edelmir Westley,” he said. “It is well that no injury resulted.”

  Even though Lord Edevane had seen fit to compliment me, I found it an unpleasant surprise that he raised the matter at all.

  “My intention was to prevent bloodshed, your lordship,” I said.

  “No bloodshed, yet Westley has thrown up his office, and seems intent on fleeing,” he said. “Yet who pursues? I trust you intend no vengeance upon him.”

  “None whatever,” said I. “We were comrades, or so I thought. His challenge came as a surprise.”

  He gave me an incurious look. “It has not escaped my attention that not everyone at court is your friend,” he said. “Do you think Westley might have been acting on the part of another?”

  For a moment my breath stopped in my throat. Here, I thought, was a chance to serve Wenlock as he deserved. Yet I hesitated—for I had no wish to become one of the secretary’s loathsome little creatures, going to their master with tales.

  Yet Edevane might know more than I, and to dissimulate was dangerous for me.

  “Westley is a gamester, and may have been in debt,” I said. “I had thought to inquire among the brokers who handle such matters, and discover if anyone had purchased Sir Edelmir’s notes.”

  “You need make no such inquiries,” said Edevane quickly. “I will look into the matter myself.”

  For Edevane, I thought, would gather what evidence he could find, and use it for his own purposes. Wenlock in prison, or exiled in disgrace, was of no use to him, but a great nobleman under his thumb would bring its own rewards.

  Well, I supposed, at least my hands would be clean in the matter. And my life would be that much simpler if no more mercenaries tried to kill me.

  Edevane gazed at me, and for the first time I saw his face change expression, to something like curiosity. “Is it not past time, Lord Warden,” he asked, “for you to travel to Inchmaden, to undertake your commission against the iron birds?”

  “I sent a deputy, my lord. If he is not in Inchmaden by now, it is because he has not yet found a ship bound for the west coast.”

  For the second time Edevane’s expression changed, this time to something approaching surprise.

  “You are not authorized a deputy, Lord Warden,” he said.

  “Surely I can employ men at my own expense,” said I. “I’ve sent a crew west equipped with mortars and other gear that may serve to trap the monsters. I thought I myself might serve better in the capital, corresponding with all the lords lieutenants about chimerae and researching the archives.”

  Edevane asked me what and who I had sent to Inchmaden, and I told him. “That seems very well reasoned,” he said.

  “Thank you, my lord.”

  By this time I had begun to understand the purpose of his soft, studied measure of speaking. All within his hearing would have to lean in toward him in order to hear him properly, and to anyone standing by he would seem the most fascinating presence in the room. And even if there were no observer, those in his company would have to pay close attention to his words.

  He leaned back in his chair and regarded me with his blank eyes. “As you will be in Howel for the present,” he said, “I wonder if I can ask for your impression of—of certain individuals.”

  It required no great intelligence to understand that he intended to employ me as an informer. I had no wish to serve him in this manner, yet, again, refusal might mark me as the enemy of the deadliest man in the realm.

  I ventured a response. “I doubt that I know very many people who would interest you.”

  His dead eyes regarded me from across his desk. “You know, for example, Their Graces of Roundsilver,” he said.

  “Ay,” said I. “But we are hardly intimates. I can’t conceive how my ideas regarding Their Graces would be of any significance, not when they are better known by practically everyone at court.”

  “It is not the Roundsilvers who interest me,” said Edevane. “But some others who have been seen in their circle. The Countess Marcella, for instance.”

  I was relieved to have nothing to say about the Aekoi lady-in-waiting. “I have spoken to her on a single occasion, nearly two months ago,” I said. “She said she would return to the Empire as soon as she could manage it.”

  “Is she even from the Empire?” asked Edevane. “Is she truly a countess?”

  “Surely the lady must have some credentials,” I said, “else Her Highness would scarcely employ her.”

  Edevane waved a hand. “In truth, I know nothing against her. But she touches the royal family, and so she is of interest and perhaps concern.”

  “If I
were to employ someone as a spy,” said I, “surely I would choose someone less conspicuous, and preferably a human instead of a gold-skinned Aekoi.”

  “She might not be a spy, but a fraudster.” Edevane gazed at the flame rising from one of his wax candles. “In truth, I fear for Her Highness.”

  “You fear that Countess Marcella might defraud her? Of what? Money?”

  The candle sent leaping flames reflecting in Edevane’s spectacles. “I fear Her Highness might be used by unscrupulous men,” he said. “Because she is near to the throne, she might become the unwitting center of a faction aimed at opposing Their Majesties. She is young and, having grown up away from the court, is inexperienced in the ways and wiles of the palace. She might be manipulated and compromised by those who wish the kingdom ill.”

  He spoke these words in his grave, thoughtful tone, and as he spoke, I felt as if insects were creeping up my spine. I suspected these phrases were not speculation on the secretary’s part, but a kind of rehearsal, a preparation for the case he would make against Floria when the time came.

  When, I thought, Berlauda gave birth to a healthy heir, and Floria was no longer needed.

  “The Pilgrim forbid such a thing,” I said with absolute sincerity.

  Edevane turned to me. “You know the princess, do you not?”

  “I have met her half a dozen times in the last three years,” I said.

  The gold-rimmed spectacles glimmered. “Yet she exerted herself to save you when you were accused of brawling in the streets of Selford.”

  “I should like to think this was due to Her Highness’s innate sense of justice. I had been set on by a pack of murderers.”

  His measured speech went on, pacing along with his relentless thought. “Yet it was due to Her Highness’s influence that those murderers went to the scaffold, and not you.”

  “They had put her in danger as well.”

  “Yet,” he insisted in his mild way, “I think she must favor you in some way.”