Kings of the Wyld

by Nicholas Eames

  Gabe looked suspiciously at Lastleaf, but it was Clay who asked what they’d both been wondering. “You knew we were coming?”

  The druin wore a wry smile, but said nothing.

  “He mentioned having seen you at Lindmoor,” Dinantra answered, “and expressed interest in meeting you again, face-to-face. Since I assumed you were coming here for Ganelon, I invited him to extend his stay in Fivecourt awhile longer.”

  “Well, that was thoughtful,” said Matrick flatly.

  Lastleaf sighed airily. “Wasn’t it? She will make a wonderful Exarch, I am sure.”

  Gabriel’s jaw worked furiously. His hopes of rescuing Rose depended on securing Ganelon’s freedom, because without the warrior’s help they stood little chance of surviving the Heartwyld. Having the rest of Saga by his side meant (hopefully) that Ganelon was less likely to kill him when Gabriel proposed that he come to Castia.

  Whatever “alteration” the druin and Dinantra had cooked up, Clay and his bandmates had little choice but to swallow it.

  “So what is this request?” Gabriel managed through gritted teeth.

  The druin seem to relish the taste of his next words before giving them voice. “I would have you know how it feels to risk death for the amusement of a mob, to hear a crowd of thousands howling for your blood. It would also, I confess, please me to watch you die. Dinantra, fortunately, is well positioned to arrange both.”

  “Holy Tetrea,” whispered Matrick, who’d gone pale despite the flush of having consumed two bowls of wine in a very short span of time. “You want us to fight in the Maxithon?”

  Lastleaf’s grin spread like a plague across his face. “I do,” he replied to Matrick, though his mismatched eyes were nailed to Gabriel. “After all, you’ve gone to such extraordinary lengths to reunite your little band. You must be planning something—a farewell tour of Grandual’s grand arenas, perhaps?” His ears skewed forward, curious. “You wouldn’t dare enter the forest, of course. Not at your age.”

  “So what is it you want us to fight?” Moog asked, changing the subject before the druin could make another guess at their objective. He pointed at Lastleaf. “Not you? You? Don’t say you.”

  Dinantra’s laugh was soft and sibilant. She shared a conspiratorial sneer with the druin before answering. “We have something special in mind. A thing this city has never seen before. If you win, Ganelon goes free.”

  She left the alternative unspoken, Clay noted.

  “What if we say no?” asked Matrick. “If we refuse to fight, what happens to Ganelon?”

  A ripple of irritation passed over Dinantra’s ruthlessly beautiful features. The snakes in her hair hissed reprovingly. “Do you imagine it is easy for me to live in Fivecourt? There are laws that grant me the right to do so, and my wealth, of course, makes things a great deal easier. And yet the people of this city barely tolerate my presence here. There are lewd murals of my likeness to be found throughout every ward. I must send servants to the market for fear of being attacked, or refused service. I am told there is even a whore in Coinbarrow who shares my name. She wears a wig of painted ropes and pretends—or allows men to pretend—that it is me to whom they are making love, as if a mortal man could survive such exquisite pleasure.”

  Clay saw the pillow between Matrick’s legs twitch slightly.

  “I have lived among these people for years,” said the gorgon, “and yet I must work tirelessly to maintain their goodwill. To my shame, that often means staging fights in the arena—something Lastleaf has assured me will be barred once our New Dominion takes root in Castia. Nevertheless, I have promised this city a spectacle, and I shall grant them one, with or without your assistance. Should you refuse to fight, Ganelon will face his death alone. And he will die, I promise you that. The Maxithon will have its blood, one way or another. Now choose.”

  Gabriel opened his mouth to protest.

  “We’ll do it,” said Clay.

  The others all looked to him. Moog smiled tightly. Matrick shrugged. Gabriel nodded, regret and relief plain in his eyes.

  “Excellent,” hissed Dinantra. “You will fight tomorrow. I have another band headlining, but I’m sure the arena master will make an exception for Saga—the Kings of the Wyld, reunited at last.”

  “Tomorrow’s fine,” Clay said, before anyone could object.

  Moog knocked his bony shoulder into the king beside him. “The sooner we finish this, the sooner we head west, right?”

  Clay saw Lastleaf’s ears cant, but the druin gave no other indication he’d caught the obvious implication in the wizard’s words.

  Gabriel spoke up before the silence provoked further inquiry. “Can we see Ganelon now?” he asked.

  The gorgon’s tail shivered, its rattle summoning the servants from the edge of the room. She handed off her bowl, slithered from her seat, and fixed Gabriel with her ruby glare. “Leave the gold,” she ordered. “Come with me.”

  Gabriel raised no objection. He stood and made to follow, leaving the sack where it lay.

  Lastleaf returned his attention to the painting behind him. “I’d wish you good luck tomorrow,” he called over his shoulder, “except, well, you know.”

  Dinantra led them past the curtained portico into the private yard beyond. They followed her down a pathway lit by small clusters of squat candles and set with coloured stones, pink and green and white. There was a manicured garden on their right. A servant wearing nothing but his standard-issue coin-sewn loincloth was trimming a hedge by torchlight into the shape of two men wrestling. At least Clay thought they were wrestling—it was hard to make out in the gloom. The man knelt as Dinantra went by, pressing his forehead to the grass. On their left was a pond similar to the one they’d seen in Kallorek’s home. Clay wondered briefly if gorgons could swim. He thought they probably could.

  “Why purchase him from the Quarry in the first place?” asked Matrick.

  “Because he is dangerous”—Dinantra’s voice drifted back to them—“and I collect dangerous things.”

  There was a small stone building at the rear of the garden. Dinantra moved to one side of the entrance and piled her green-gold coils beneath her. “Ganelon is yours for the evening. I will arrange rooms for you in the city. Something suitable, I assure you. I will also provide guards to make certain you honour our agreement. Now go on,” she said. “He is inside.”

  Gabriel went first, pushing open the heavy door and stepping into the shadowed interior. Moog and Matrick disappeared after him. Clay stood outside for a few heartbeats more. There was a cold spear of dread in his gut. He imagined Ganelon’s resentment at having been abandoned by his so-called friends when he’d needed them most, the bitterness he no doubt felt at being released from the Quarry only to become the slave of a mercantile gorgon. As much as anything, he feared to find the warrior a shadow of his former self, broken by prison, cowed by a decade of indentured servitude. Would they find him on his knees, with nothing but a cloth of tarnished coins to hide his shame? Or had Dinantra kept him in chains, caged like a beast in this shadowed place?

  The gorgon was watching him, the hint of a simper on her lips.

  He stepped through the door. The room beyond was dark. Bands of pale starlight streamed through the close-set bars of a west-facing window. The air inside was stale. The dust kicked up by their arrival took to the air, swirling like snowflakes around the room’s petrified occupant.

  “It’s him,” said Moog, reaching to graze his fingers across the basalt face. His voice was reverent and softened by sorrow. “It’s Ganelon.”

  They had a saying up north: the coin that broke the dragon’s back. It was derived from the idea that a dragon hoarding one trinket too many might drown beneath the weight of its own avarice, and it meant—or at least Clay thought it meant—that even the mightiest of things (dragons, for example) had a point at which even the smallest detail could signify their doom.

  They had a similar saying down south: the straw that broke the camel’s back—though wh
y you’d put a piece of straw on a camel’s back was, to Clay, an utter mystery. They were a curious people, southerners.

  Although Ganelon murdering the Sultana’s son wasn’t solely responsible for Saga’s disbanding, it was, in hindsight, the coin that broke the dragon’s back.

  Not that Clay could fault him for doing so, of course. The Narmeeri prince, while visiting the town of Mazala, had forced himself on a woman Ganelon was exceptionally fond of, and Ganelon responded by killing the entire Narmeeri garrison. As a consequence, the prince ordered the woman burned to death in the town square, prompting Ganelon to visit a similar fate upon the prince himself, though not before hurting him so badly that death by fire was an act of mercy.

  The Sultana was justifiably furious, and Ganelon’s bandmates, for one reason or another, were unwilling to bear the brunt of her wrath.

  Months earlier, Valery had confessed to Gabriel that she was carrying his child. The augurs told her it would be a girl, and Gabriel had blithely remarked that she would grow up to be a big-time hero, like her father. Which was, everything considered, devastatingly ironic.

  Moog’s husband, Fredrick, who was a renowned mercenary in his own right, had contracted the rot a year before, having forayed one too many times beneath the poisoned eaves of the black forest. The wizard was determined to find a cure, and had already requested a leave of absence from the band. By the time he heard of Ganelon’s arrest, Moog was too concerned with saving Freddie to lend his aid. Freddie, despite this, died a few months later.

  In those days Matrick was receiving letters almost daily from Lilith, who hadn’t yet evolved into the merciless, sex-crazed harpy-queen she eventually became. The young princess was besotted with Saga’s rogue. She wrote to him that her father was gravely ill, and that Matrick should remain in Agria, marry her, and rule as king once the old fucker (as she so lovingly put it) was dead.

  And as for Clay Cooper? He’d never dreamt of being in a band, nor wanted any part of the notoriety that came along with it. He loved the boys like brothers—even Ganelon—but although Clay was awfully good at killing things, the thought of doing so for another ten years while avoiding the ire of a vengeful monarch didn’t sit with him at all. He’d wanted to go home, to leave violence in his past, and, more than anything, to try and live up to the words he’d scratched onto the birch that marked his mother’s grave all those blood-soaked years ago.

  So Ganelon took the fall alone. It wasn’t a betrayal—not really, since he was in fact guilty of murdering a prince, and several “innocent” men besides—but it certainly felt like one to Clay, who had borne the burden of that choice like a cloak of cast iron ever since. He wondered now if freeing Ganelon only because they needed his help might not be, as far as Ganelon’s forbearance was concerned, the straw that broke the camel’s—

  Ah, Clay thought, as the meaning behind the metaphor became suddenly obvious, I get it now.

  Gabriel’s desperate plan had come, at last, to fruition. Against all odds, the band was back together.

  It would be just like old times, except that Moog was dying of an incurable ailment, Matrick was hideously out of shape, Gabriel—their proud and fearless leader—had gone meek as a newborn kitten, and Clay wanted nothing more than to go home, hug his wife, and tell his darling daughter stories of grand exploits that were all, thankfully, far behind him.

  Ganelon, at least, would be virtually unchanged, as hale and healthy as the day the Sultana’s magi had turned him to stone nearly twenty years before.

  As Moog searched his bag for a means to undo the southerner’s petrifaction, Clay found himself envisioning how the moments following Ganelon’s release might unfold. In almost every scenario Clay and his bandmates ended up dead at the warrior’s feet. Ganelon had always been Saga’s most skilled fighter; for him to end them now would be a simple thing, easy as an eagle killing its offspring.

  Ganelon had been conceived, born, and bred to violence. He’d been an orphan by the age of eleven, a mercenary since fourteen. The southern warrior had no doubt undergone as many wild adventures before joining Saga as the five of them had in the ten years after. He claimed there’d been a bard around for most of them, but Clay had yet to hear a song or story about Ganelon’s youth that did not come from the warrior himself.

  More so than most—Clay included—Ganelon was a man defined by his origins. His mother had been sold as a child to a brothel in Xanses. His father had been one of the Sultana’s prized Kaskar bodyguards, and the union of these two disparate souls had been in no way romantic, or loving, or even consensual, Clay presumed, since the Narmeeri whore had killed the Kaskar giant in his sleep immediately afterward.

  From his father, Ganelon had inherited a northman’s green eyes and imposing height, an explosive temper, and an innate capacity for bloodshed. From his mother: ferocity, fortitude of mind, and a small voice in the back of his mind that served, when he was wise enough to listen, as his conscience.

  “Ah, here.” Moog carefully withdrew a potted cactus from the void within his bag. “Hold this,” he said, handing the sack off to Matrick. He knelt and set the cactus on the floor before, very cautiously, plucking one of its spines and clamping it between his teeth. Then he motioned for his bag and swiped it over the cactus like it was a feral cat he feared might scratch him. Finally he took the spine from his mouth and used its tip to prick the hulking stone statue in the foot.

  Standing, Moog flicked the spine away. “This should just take a minute,” he told them.

  Clay wondered as the seconds ticked by how exactly one emerged from a state of petrifaction. Would the warrior rage and flail, his mind still trapped in the instant the spell of stone had taken hold? He took a cautious step back, flexing his right hand, ready to catch Blackheart’s grip should he need to shrug it free.

  He examined the southerner’s statue as he waited. Ganelon wasn’t quite so tall as Clay. His arms weren’t as bulky, his shoulders not as broad. And yet Ganelon, to Clay’s mind, had always cut a more imposing figure. Whereas Clay Cooper was built like a great big bear—as adept at fighting as he would be at sleeping through a harsh winter in a cozy cave—Ganelon was lean as a wolf, sleek as a panther: His whole physique seemed formed by the brutal economy of nature for a deadly and singular purpose.

  Clay watched, fascinated, as the spell began to fade. The dull stone became braided black hair strung with ivory beads. It became dark brown flesh and corded muscle laced with pale scars. Deep browed, broad nosed, black whiskered … Ganelon blinked dust from his lashes, and after a disoriented moment he seemed to realize he wasn’t alone. The warrior levelled his green-eyed glare at each of them in turn. His nostrils flared, and Clay started counting down the seconds until the bloodbath—their blood, his bath—kicked off.

  Those seconds stretched on and on, until finally Ganelon cleared his throat, turned to Gabriel, and asked in a voice that cracked like old parchment, “How long?”

  “Nineteen years,” said Gabriel.

  The warrior closed his eyes. His jaw worked furiously. His chest heaved as the breath of empty decades flooded his lungs. At last he loosed a long sigh. He rolled a kink from his shoulders and pressed his neck to one side—it cracked so loud Moog jumped like a startled rabbit. Ganelon glanced at the wizard and chuckled. Slowly, his eyes moved to Matrick, then to Gabriel, then to Clay. Another silence took hold, leadened by the weight of settling dust.

  “You all look like shit,” he said at last.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  The Riot House

  The Riot House was Fivecourt’s most infamous tavern. There was a sign above the door that depicted a man riding a sheep. The words WYATT’S REST were carved out beneath, but whoever Wyatt was, he’d ridden his sheep out of town long before Clay had ever set eyes on the place. It was an inn, an alehouse, a brothel, and a gambling den. It was a place for fences to fence and whores to whore, a haven for drunks, a sanctuary for addicts, a seven-storey circus that Clay hadn’t known how much he’d mis
sed until he walked through the door with his band at his back.

  It looked much the same as he remembered it: the bar, the booths, the dicing tables scattered in the centre of the room. There was a skirted stage backed by a double-wide fireplace, currently occupied by a troupe of four women, three of whom were playing instruments while the fourth wailed like a banshee falling off a cliff. The warped wooden floor was stained with spilled beer and dried blood. Shattered bottles and the splintered remains of broken chairs told the story of epic brawls (the Riot House was good for one a night, at least), and the smoke-clouded air was filled with the babble of several hundred patrons shouting and laughing and cursing all at once.

  Clay was gazing up at the stacked tiers of the inn’s hollow interior. He spotted the fourth-floor balcony from which Matrick had thrown a burning mattress onto the commons below, and there: the third-floor balcony from which Clay himself had fallen during a brawl with a Kaskar whose sister he’d refused to take to bed. Kaskars were funny that way.

  To be back in the Riot House, to find it unchanged after all these years, felt to Clay like a dream, as though he’d taken a step twenty years into the past. He half-expected to see his old self swagger by, young and dumb, unmindful of anything but the drink in his hand, the woman on his arm, the coins burning a hole in his pocket.

  Gabriel clapped him on the shoulder. “I’ll go see about the rooms.”

  “I’ll be at the bar,” said Matrick.

  And then someone, somewhere, shouted, “There they are!” and things pretty much went downhill from there.

  The whole place had been waiting for them. Dinantra had sent word ahead, and every newcomer through the door (beside which the gorgon’s thugs stood to make sure Ganelon and the others remained inside) assured them that word of their fight the following day was spreading like fire through the city. Mercenaries formed a queue for handshakes and high fives. A bard took the stage to sing their exploits, and the balconies teemed with patrons eager for a look at what had once been the greatest band in all the world.