Kings of the Wyld

by Nicholas Eames

  While he was gone Clay took a moment to survey the kobolds’ dingy quarters. He made his way toward the back, picking his way carefully around piles of rubbish. He saw a rusted brazier topped by a charred metal grille that served double duty as both a cooking appliance and a heat source. There were two tin buckets, one for discarded bones and offal, and a second whose contents made the first bucket look appetizing by comparison. A scrap of breeze-blown rag served as a curtain for what was either a window or a sizable hole in the wall.

  He looked again at the nests crowding one corner. They were made primarily of straw and cloth scraps, but each had been decorated by its occupant according to their taste. Oddly, one of them was festooned with bent knives and broken arrow shafts. When Clay knelt to examine it, one of Fender’s so-called chittens yelped and leapt inside it, then bared its teeth at Clay and hissed.

  “His name is Shortknife,” said Gabriel. “He’s a bit … strange.”

  Clay stood and backed off slowly. “You know their names?” he asked.

  Gabriel nodded. “That’s Cowlick, Boneriddle, Sharptongue,” he pointed each out as he named them, and then glanced down at the one nuzzling his leg. “And this is Shyeye.”

  “Since when are you on a first-name basis with bloody kobolds?” asked Matrick.

  “And why trust one with your shin—” Clay caught himself before the word shiny left his mouth, but barely. “With holding on to coin?” he finished.

  “You’ve seen kobold lairs,” said Gabriel. “They hoard any- and everything that glitters, and they never spend it.”

  True enough, Clay had to admit. Kobolds might be filthy, but most were filthy rich. The concept of coins as currency was utterly lost on them. If something didn’t shine, gleam, or sparkle, then it held little value outside of bartering for something that did. You could trade a brass ring to a kobold in exchange for a healthy horse and the kobold would think it came out on top.

  “I met Fender a few years back,” Gabriel explained. “I had a gig to drive a clan of urskin from part of the sewer, and there turned out to be more of them than my employer let on. A lot more. Fender and Oozilk hid me for a while. They even helped cure me of a poison the frogmen used on their arrows.”

  “Oozilk?” Moog asked.

  “His wife,” said Gabriel, and then cast around as if only now realizing she wasn’t there.

  Clay heard a thud overhead. Bits of plaster and chips of rotted wood rained down. Followed by the sound of something heavy being dragged across the floor above them.

  “Anyway, I solved their urskin problem, and then vouched for them when they made the move from sewer to city, so I guess you could say we trust one another. Before heading out for Coverdale I left everything I’d earned these past few years with Fender.”

  Everything he’d earned came plummeting through the hole in the roof, thankfully contained in a tied-off sack that landed with a heavily clinking thump. Fender came down after it, dangling by his claws for a moment before dropping lightly onto the sack. He sprang off it, and dragged it with two hands across the grimy floor. The chitten named Shortknife watched it greedily, the way a human child might watch an elaborate dessert paraded out after supper.

  “Shiny here,” Fender grumbled, abandoning his burden at Gabriel’s feet.

  Gabe found half a smile somewhere. “Thank you, Fender. Hey, where is Oozilk?”

  “Not here,” the kobold said quickly. “Gone.”

  “Gone?” And there went the half smile. “Gone where?”

  Fender made a groaning sound that reminded Clay of the one Griff made whenever Clay ordered the little dog off the bed. The kobold’s torch-bright eyes seemed to gutter when he spoke next. “Oozilk get in fight-scrap at give-take.”

  “Give-take?” asked Moog.

  “The market,” said Gabriel distractedly. “She got in a fight at the market. Go on, Fender. When was this?”

  “Ah, year back, year back. Oozilk tooth-bite merchant-man, merchant-man send club-goons, club-goons take Oozilk. Fender try and fight-scrap club-goons, but they make warning: Take Oozilk, or take chittens. So Oozilk gone.”

  “Gone where?” Gabriel asked. “Where did they take her? Back to the sewer?”

  “No sewer,” answered Fender, then pointed a crooked finger at the south wall, beyond which lay the sluggish river and the colossal arena floating upon it. “To noise-bowl.”

  Clay was only half-surprised to see the carriage still waiting for them when he and his bandmates emerged from the alley. The driver looked just as relieved to see them, since his akra were growing restless. Both of them were bright red now, and whining like chicks awaiting the worm.

  The ship on which the fight had broken out was on fire. Those on both sides of the clash had gathered on the quay to watch it burn.

  Matrick hauled his bulk into the carriage, nodding curtly as the driver returned his dagger. The king, somewhat creepily, kissed the blade before sheathing it. Moog climbed in after, and winced at some pain in the foot he was using for leverage.

  The left one, Clay noted. The infected one.

  “You all right?” asked Matrick.

  Moog still hadn’t worked up the courage to tell Matty about his affliction. “Fine!” said the wizard a little too loudly. “Just not as spry as I used to be.”

  Matrick chuckled and put a hand on his stomach. “Fucking tell me about it. Hey Gabe, maybe give me a few months’ warning the next time you decide to drag my fat ass across the Heartwyld, eh? I’d have done a few laps around the castle, or maybe not eaten a pie every day.”

  Moog looked doubtful. “You ate pie every day?”

  Matrick shrugged. “Damned right I did, or else what’s the point of being king?”

  Gabriel, meanwhile, was still standing at the alley mouth. At a glance, Clay assumed he was watching the ship in flames, but then realized he was looking past it, transfixed by the daunting immensity of the Maxithon.

  “Gabe,” Clay called, and after a moment his friend tore his gaze from the arena and joined them in the carriage. Gabriel sat with the sack cradled in his lap, saying nothing. The quiet sullenness that seemed the dominant part of his nature these days had returned, and not without reason. Gabriel had vouched for Fender and his wife to move from the sewers into the slightly less foul-smelling streets above. He no doubt felt responsible for Oozilk’s capture. Her death (because Clay couldn’t imagine a kobold lasting long in the arena) would join the many burdens camped like crows on the frontman’s shoulders, from letting his band fall apart, to allowing his marriage to crumble, to driving his daughter to repeat the same reckless mistakes of her father.

  The driver cracked the reins, urging his red-feathered akra on through the riotous streets of Coinbarrow, weaving through the press of drunks, scratch addicts, scratch dealers, off-duty courtsmen in six-striped tabards, and rowdy river men looking to exchange a few silver crowns for a strong drink, a keen woman, and an itchy red rash come morning.

  The air itself was a wild brawl of smells and sounds: the punch of unwashed flesh, the scream of a scratching mandolin, the jab of tobacco smoke, the glee of a whistling pipe, the occasional head butt of sour urine, the aching sorrow of a moaning lute. All that, and voices singing, laughing, yelling, swearing, and groaning in myriad different ways.

  Clay craned his neck as they rattled by one of the four square towers to which the Maxithon was anchored by the thickest chains he’d ever seen. Graffiti marred the tower’s base, most of it illegible, although Clay’s eyes picked out four words scrawled in bright white paint that stood out from all the rest: Long live the Duke.

  They veered right, rumbling uphill, and soon left Coinbarrow behind. As their unease abated, the akra’s feathers changed colour. One of them went white again, while the other turned a dusky blue. When Matrick ventured to ask the driver what the bird’s blue feathers denoted the man glanced over his shoulder and growled, “I’ll say this: Don’t bend over near it.”

  They turned left onto the city’s ma
in thoroughfare, a broad avenue called Sintra’s Ring that carved a circle through every ward in Fivecourt, and soon passed beneath a massive arch into the Narmeeri Ward. Carved in relief along the top of the ward gate were the words SUFFER NO TYRANTS, the origin of which Moog used to explain every single time Saga had been to the city. Clay had never been much for history lessons—he had trouble remembering the words to most songs—but it was hard to forget one that had been drilled into your head five times a year for ten years running.

  In the wake of the Reclamation Wars, when the last of the Hordes had been scattered, the Company of Kings had envisioned a unified Grandual: a single, spanning empire to rival the lost Dominion of druinkind. They promoted one among them to the rank of Emperor, and named Fivecourt the Imperial capital.

  But hardly a year had passed—and the foundations had only just been laid for the Emperor’s grand palace—before the new Emperor issued two ill-fated edicts that historians unilaterally agree proved to be his undoing. The first of these was, as Moog colourfully phrased it whenever he told the story, “to tax the living shit out of his subjects.” The next was to demand that the firstborn daughter of every noble household be sent as a hostage to Fivecourt. Upon their arrival the Emperor announced their great good fortune of being the founding members of his brand-new harem.

  The noble daughters responded poorly to this decree, and the first Emperor of Grandual died due to what Moog dubbed “testicular asphyxiation,” which is to say they stuffed his severed balls down his throat.

  The daughters were executed, the nobles rebelled, and the Emperor’s son and heir fled west, through the Heartwyld and over the mountains, to Endland.

  “Hey,” Moog blurted, startling everyone. “Have I ever told you guys why it says ‘Suffer no Tyrants’ above the ward gates?”

  “Yes,” said Gabriel.

  “You have,” said Clay.

  “Like a hundred million times,” said Matrick, and the wizard slumped back into his seat.

  They’d entered the Narmeeri Ward, and but for the arena floating on the river below, Clay could have imagined the carriage had ambled into the southern sultanate itself. The streets here were cramped and curving; bands of pale moonlight filtered between swathes of red and gold cloth draped overhead. The driver wisely avoided the night market, but Clay could hear the babble of voices from the grand bazaar near the heart of the ward. The mingling scents of spice and heady hookah smoke wafted on an unseasonably warm breeze that contained a startling amount of gritty sand.

  They rolled by several temples to the Summer Lord, who the southerners called Vizan and worshipped with a sort of reverent fear, the way everyone else did the Winter Queen, and finally passed through another gate into the highest tier of the city. Here were the estates belonging to Narmeeri grandees, and even a small palace occupied by the Sultana herself whenever she deigned to visit Fivecourt. Her salvaged druin skyship, The Second Sun, was moored there now, its fanning sails crackling with static discharge.

  Clay decided he’d let Gabriel sulk long enough. They were nearing their destination, he presumed, and yet he had no idea where exactly it was they were going, or why.

  “What’s the money for?” he asked.

  Gabriel looked over, his blue eyes hooded, his jaw working as though he were chewing on something. Finally, he answered, “It’s for Ganelon.”

  Matrick frowned, leaning forward. “When did he get out of prison? I was led to believe those sent to the Quarry were sent there to stay.”

  Clay, too, had been under that impression. He’d tried to ask Gabriel about it before Jain and the Silk Arrows had robbed them outside Coverdale.

  Ganelon had killed a Narmeeri prince, after all—the eldest son of the Sultana—and neither Saga’s celebrity status nor the fact that he’d committed murder for a very, very good reason could protect him from her wrath. The Sultana’s magi had hunted him down, and for reasons each their own, Ganelon’s bandmates had been conspicuously absent when he’d needed them most.

  The warrior was eventually captured, confined to an inescapable prison known as the Quarry—inescapable because its inhabitants, which included a veritable who’s who of Grandual’s most dangerous criminals, were turned to stone. Clay had heard it said the Quarry was tended by Keepers, who were blinded at birth and raised to know every inch of the prison by touch alone, and guarded by basilisks, the gazes of which could turn exposed flesh to stone.

  “He’s out of the Quarry,” said Gabriel.

  “Is he a mercenary?” Moog wanted to know. “Did he go solo? I mean, I understand he may not like us much, but … Ganelon never really seemed that interested in getting paid, you know? It was always more about the … um …”

  “Killing,” said Matrick helpfully.

  “Well, basically, yeah. It just seems odd he’d refuse to help save Rose unless you paid him.”

  “The money isn’t to pay Ganelon,” Gabriel said, his eyes still glued to the sack of coins on his lap. “It’s to set him free.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  Guests of the Gorgon

  The money, Gabriel confessed, was for a woman named Dinantra, in whose anteroom Clay and his bandmates were left to wait by a half-naked male servant who had greeted them at the door. Like Kallorek, who was often referred to as the Orc behind his back, Dinantra was known by a similarly monstrous moniker: the Gorgon. Whereas Kallorek’s nickname was a testament to his brutish manner and prodigious overbite, however, Dinantra owed hers to the fact that she was, in truth, a gorgon.

  Despite that, when she finally swept into the anteroom Clay found her strikingly beautiful for a woman with a headful of snakes. The scales of her serpentine tail were the greenish gold of rain-washed copper, paling to cream at her throat and on the underside of her arms. She wore a tightly-cinched bodice that proffered her breasts like melons at a market stall, but it was all Clay could do not to drown in her eyes, which were the red of bruised apples in the fickle lamplight. The nest of serpents surrounding her face were the same colour. They hissed quietly whenever she spoke, underlying each word with a sibilant whisper.

  “My dear Gabriel,” she said, “how pleasant to see you again. I’ll confess I didn’t expect you to return so soon, if at all.”

  “I’ve brought your money,” said Gabriel.

  “And friends as well,” she said, casting that smouldering gaze around what seemed to Clay to be a suddenly cramped room. There were plinths along each wall adorned with the sculpted heads of what, presumably, were the gorgon’s vaunted ancestors. “I do enjoy company,” purred Dinantra. “In fact, I already have some.”

  Gabriel swallowed. The sack in his arms clinked as he shifted uncomfortably. “We could come back tomorrow,” he said, “but no later. I need—”

  “Nonsense,” she said, her voice seeming to tickle the inside of Clay’s ear. “You’ve come all this way, and I think you’ll find my guest as diverting as I.”

  Before Gabriel could muster a protest she turned and slithered deeper into the house. Gabe sighed, and started after her. Moog reached out to touch the snake-stone hair of one of the ancestral busts, while Matrick found his reflection in a nearby mirror and raked self-consciously at his tousled hair.

  “I know the whole ‘gorgons turning men to stone’ thing is a myth,” he said quietly, “but I’m hard as a rock right now.”

  Clay levelled a glare at the man who’d been his king less than a week ago. “Seriously?”

  Matrick’s reflection winked in reply.

  There was a dull snap, and Clay turned to find Moog holding a broken stone snake in his hand, looking as guilty as a child caught with their hand in the cookie jar.

  “Nothing,” said the wizard. “What? Wasn’t me.” He pried open his bottomless bag and tossed the shard inside, then motioned to the hallway down which Gabe and the Gorgon had disappeared. “Shall we?”

  Clay had encountered a few gorgons in his time, and so knew a little about what to expect beyond the anteroom. Such creatures we
re avid art collectors, prizing everything from tastefully framed paintings to elegant furniture. What they loved most, though, were statues, and there were several in the expansive room into which Dinantra led them. Broad ramps curved up to either side, prompting Clay to realize that he’d never considered the difficulty a gorgon might have with conventional stairs.

  The opposite wall was an open portico hung with gauzy curtains adrift on the cooling breeze. The room was aglow with the soft light of tall candles, and Clay watched Dinantra’s silhouette waver before them, marvelling that a woman whose lower half was a snake could manage an enthralling sway of her hips. The scent of cinnamon and roses wafted in her wake. There was music in the air, lilting Narmeeri twangs that reminded Clay of the desert, and of desert nights.

  The gorgon’s other guest stood near the opposite side of the room, facing whatever lay in the darkness beyond. He wore a tattered red longcoat, and there were three scabbards slung sideways—

  Oh gods …

  Clay froze. Gabriel froze. Moog and Matrick, who’d been chatting to each other as they entered, fell silent.

  The Duke of Endland turned, grinning his jagged druin grin. “Hello, Gabriel,” he said in a tone a cat might have used to greet a sleeping mouse stirring awake beneath its gaze. “And is that Old King Matrick I see behind you? I’d heard you were dead.”

  Matrick tried giving voice to some jibe or another, but instead he just stood there, gaping like a fish left to die on the bottom of a boat.

  Lastleaf’s mismatched eyes brushed over Moog, lingered a moment longer on Clay himself. “My apologies for not recognizing the rest of you at Lindmoor. I was rather preoccupied at the time, and in fairness you’ve aged considerably since last we met.”

  Clay belatedly noticed at least a dozen heavily muscled men positioned around the room. Each wore a mirrored buckler on one arm, a close-faced helmet, and a loincloth sewn with gold coins. They each stood at rigid attention, clasping a long spear in both hands before them. Clay hadn’t decided yet whether or not to be reassured or worried by their presence.