The Queen's Necklace
Page 14
Will frowned. Though he supposed some such disaster had been practically inevitable the moment Dionee decided to borrow the little jeweled engine without permission, he did not understand how anything like this could happen with a crowd of his men surrounding the queen. “But your guards? I hope you don’t mean to say they did nothing to defend you?”
“They tried to defend me, but there were only the four of them. And the coachman—he was very brave, but the thieves took his musket and beat him over the head until the blood ran down into his eyes.” She wrung her hands and began to weep again.
This time, however, Will was unmoved by her distress.
“I begin to understand,” he said coldly. “You went out wearing a fortune in jewels, carrying with you one of the palace heirlooms, and you went with only a minimal escort. As a result, two of my men are dead, your coachman is likely to die of a cracked skull, and the heirloom is missing. I congratulate you, Dionee. You have surpassed all your previous follies and have finally achieved something it will be difficult ever to match.”
“But Wilrowan,” she whispered, “I never left the city the whole time—and who would have thought that footpads would—would do anything so bold?”
Wilrowan blinked at her, much struck by that idea. “Now that I think of it, I’ve never heard of footpads holding up a coach—nor of highwaymen waylaying anyone inside the town. Yes, and four armed men should have been enough to discourage ordinary thieves. The whole thing is incredible.”
He rose to his feet, began to pace the floor. “But you said that Rodaric doesn’t know what happened. How could he not know that you were robbed—particularly with half your escort murdered right there in the street?”
“Well, of course he knows I was robbed, but he doesn’t know about the little orrery. I made certain that no one told him.”
Will stopped walking. “If you tell me you bribed the two surviving men—my men—to keep silent, I don’t know, Dionee, what I am likely to do to you.”
“No, no, it was nothing like that. I begged them to keep my secret for a few days. They said it was a troublesome question of—of conflicting loyalties, and agreed to keep silent until they spoke to you. With your two lieutenants dead, that was the proper thing, wasn’t it? It—it never occurred to me they might be bribed.”
“You astonish me,” he said, beginning to pace again. “I should have thought that suborning guardsmen—” He decided not to pursue it. “What of your maids-of-honor? There must have been one or two in the coach with you.”
“Luisa was with me. She shrieked and fell into a dead faint before the robbers even entered the coach.” Dionee gazed up at Will hopefully. “I thought you could go to some of your low friends, your pickpockets and highwaymen, and find out who is responsible.” She wiped the tears off her cheeks with the back of one hand. “If you did that—if we found a way to buy it back again, Rodaric might never need to know that his precious heirloom was missing.”
Will stopped in his tracks. “Eternal darkness, Dionee! I won’t be a party to any such thing.”
She began to cry again. “You won’t help me to recover the little engine?”
“That, most certainly, if I am able. But I will not allow you to go on deceiving Rodaric. He will have to be told at once. No, I mean it, Dionee, you can go on weeping as much as you like, but on this point I will not be moved.”
Then, relenting just a little, he went and stood over her, lifted one of her hands and dropped a kiss on it.
“Compose yourself, my dear. I can’t condone any such dangerous deception, but if you feel you need me there at your side when you tell the king, I remind you that I am yours to command.”
12
As Dionee needed time to dress and compose herself, Will made haste to his own rooms, in order to clean up after his journey and render himself presentable for a meeting with the king.
The barracks were located in an old brick pile at the back of the palace, where the clatter of men coming and going at all hours, the carousing that sometimes went on far into the night, would not disturb the king and the queen at their rest. The chambers were small, drafty, and dark, and the building was largely ruinous—doves nested in the rafters, winds whistled in the lower corridors, rain came hissing down the chimneys and put the fires out—but the men were content. With no wives, sisters, or mothers on hand to air out the rooms or tidy their things away, they were able to lead a rakish, rollicking bachelor existence and maintain an atmosphere made up in equal parts of tobacco, old boots, brandy, and gunpowder.
In his tiny bedchamber under the roof tiles, Will pulled on a worn velvet bell-cord, summoning the very junior guardsman who served as his valet. That worthy youth presenting himself several minutes later, Will demanded to be dressed in as little time as possible.
Young Swallow rose to the occasion. In half an hour, Will was washed and shaved, his hair immaculately dressed and powdered. In forty-five minutes he was in uniform—green coat, white waistcoat and breeches, black leather boots reaching past the knee—arranging the deep rows of Chêneboix lace at his wrists and throat. In two minutes more, he had strapped on a sword with a silver hilt, tucked a black three-cornered hat with a feather panache under one arm.
It was thus a supremely elegant Captain Blackheart, the very picture of a gallant young officer, who escorted the queen into King Rodaric’s walnut-panelled study and set a chair for her beside the king’s desk.
If Rodaric was somewhat taken aback by the sight of Wilrowan after hearing that Will had forsaken Hawkesbridge for at least a fortnight, Will and Dionee were totally unprepared for the explosion that followed her stammering confession. Sweeping aside the papers, pens, and silver inkstand on his desk with an uncharacteristic oath, Rodaric rose from his big oak armchair and began to pace the floor in an agitated manner.
A careful man of five-and-thirty, King Rodaric always had an eye toward appearances, and though his ire was easily aroused his rages were generally cold, controlled, and distinguished by sarcasm rather than by cursing or physical violence. He looked capable of violence now, however. Seeing this, Dionee grew agitated, too, and dropped her lace handkerchief. Will picked it up, handed it back without a word, and stationed himself behind her chair.
“But after all, I know that the Chaos Machine is very, very old and very, very valuable, but if it can’t be recovered, it can be replaced,” she protested. “If I sell everything I own: all of my jewels, both of my carriages—”
Rodaric continued to pace. In the clear light of a crystal oil lamp burning on his desk, his face was grim. “Not if you sold the Volary and everything in it. Dionee, you have lost the one thing in the palace, in Hawkesbridge, in all Mountfalcon—which—cannot—possibly—be—replaced.” He bit off the words one by one for emphasis. “You have lost one of the Goblin Jewels.”
Dionee clasped her hands in front of her face, shook her head in denial. “But, sir, how could I—how could I? It is the Orb of Mountfalcon, not some absurd toy—”
“It is the Orb of Mountfalcon that is a sham, a bauble, a toy. It has one purpose only: to serve as a decoy for traitors and thieves, and so keep the Chaos Machine safe.”
Dionee continued to shake her head. “But I have seen—everyone has seen you open the little golden globe and display the intricate machinery inside.”
“Ordinary clockwork, the merest counterfeit. How clumsy a counterfeit you would know if you had ever compared it with the infinitely more delicate machinery, the exquisite tiny gemstones inside the Chaos Machine.”
Dionee sat with her head bowed. “But how can this be? And why—why was I never told?”
Rodaric ignored her question. “It is the same with all the other so-called Maglore treasures—the Silver Nef, the Blue Glass Swan—all of them. They were all created for the same purpose: to protect the real Jewels from ordinary thieves and to discourage any royal house with Ambitions from stealing the Jewels of the other houses and consolidating all of that power in one place.”
Will cleared his throat. “If you will pardon my saying so, Your Majesty, it seems to be a—transparent deception.”
Rodaric stiffened and turned his cold grey eyes in Will’s direction, as if he had just received an unwelcome surprise. As perhaps he had; it was unlikely he would have said nearly so much had he remembered Will was present.
“Pointless, too, because at least a hundred people at any one time would know the truth. It hardly seems like a secret at all. Did whoever concocted this scheme really believe they could keep the Jewels safe with such an obvious ruse?”
“A naïve deception, perhaps,” Rodaric allowed, “but one that has succeeded for fifteen hundred years. Perhaps because it was so simple. And even though so many people know a part of the truth, no one could identify all of the Jewels except the Maglore who created them—and the Maglore, of course, are all extinct.”
“I expect,” said Dionee, twisting her handkerchief, “that if the thieves—whoever they are—were to find out what it is they have, the ransom would be truly staggering.”
Rodaric drew his hands out of his pockets. “If they were willing to negotiate, we would be fortunate indeed, whatever they might ask. Dionee, do you have any idea how much our people depend on the Mountfalcon Jewel? We are a land-locked nation, do you know what that means?”
“That we have to pay tolls and tariffs to our immediate neighbors to bring in trade goods, to get everything we need.”
“And how do we pay these tolls and tariffs?”
“Sir, I do know these things. I’m not entirely frivolous. It’s with iron and tin and—and coal, which they don’t have.”
“And iron, tin, and coal have to be dug up out of the ground, an arduous and even dangerous process. There are ancient mines in the mountains to the northeast and southwest of Hawkesbridge, mines which have been active for thousands of years. The veins run remarkably deep, and the mines are vast beyond your comprehension. Many of the pumps that keep them from flooding are so old and primitive, the timbers that shore up the tunnels so ancient and fragile, you would think the miners would be terrified to enter them, yet enter they do and bring up the ores we so desperately need. Do you know why?”
“Because,” Will answered for Dionee, “it’s not just pumps that keep the mines dry, not just timbers that shore up the tunnels. It’s the tiny engine inside the Mountfalcon Jewel, working at a distance.”
“Precisely. But not at too great a distance. And those very small gears and wheels need frequent adjustment, just as any ordinary watch or clockwork does. In the wrong hands, it would eventually run down. If the Chaos Machine is not restored to me within half a year, the mines will become so dangerous, I could not in good conscience allow anyone to enter them.”
“You say that you have half a year,” said Will. “In those six and a half months, you could send engineers down into the mines; they could repair the ordinary machinery, make the tunnels safe.”
“I doubt they could accomplish all that needs to be done in six months or sixty months. You have little idea of the depth and immensity of those mines. The first time I went down into one of them, I was staggered by what seemed to me an infinity of branching tunnels. And if we attempted to do any such thing,” Rodaric added, “everyone would know that the Jewel was missing—and that could be fatal.”
He stood up. Beckoning Dionee to follow him, he picked up the lamp from his desk. Crossing the floor in two long strides, Rodaric swept aside the moth-eaten crimson draperies at one end of the room, and led the way into the vast shadowy chamber beyond. Though he had not been invited to do so, Wilrowan could not resist following silently, several paces behind.
King Rodaric’s library was one of the wonders of the Volary, rising shelf upon shelf, balcony above balcony, six stories high to a domed ceiling. The air inside was heavy with the musty odor of ten thousand books. On every balcony perched lindenwood statues, intricately carved and richly gilded, creatures symbolizing the four elements—harpies for air, mermaids for water, salamanders for fire, gorgons for earth—which gazed down from the heights with their blank wooden eyes: silent, inscrutable, old as the palace itself.
In the center of the floor there was painted a great map of the world: twenty-five feet across from corner to corner. Though the pigments had faded and grown dingy over the years, though the names of the cities and nations, originally done in spidery-thin letters of gold paint, had been worn by the passage of many feet until only a few dull metallic flecks remained, it was still possible to make out the dim outlines of five continents, and to gain a vague impression of mountains, rivers, and seas.
Taking Dionee by the hand, Rodaric drew her toward that part of the map occupied by Mountfalcon and her nearest neighbors. “The mountains I spoke of, I should perhaps remind you, border on Herndyke, Chêneboix, and Montagne-du-Soliel. If the thieves who took the Chaos Machine were not ordinary footpads but agents of some other ruler, if it became known that the Mountfalcon Jewel was in his hands, the people who live in our mining towns might conceivably decide they owe their allegiance to that man instead of to me. Someone may be trying to expand his borders, someone may be attempting to build—an empire.”
Will felt a shiver pass over his skin; looking past Rodaric to Dionee, he saw that her eyes were wide with shock.
For nearly fifteen hundred years, the world had existed in a precious but perilous balance. No kingdom, arch-duchy, or principality was allowed to gain ascendency over the others. Alliances were forbidden; the ruling houses could not intermarry. Yet nightmarish memories of the Maglore Empire, its monstrous excesses, its long history of oppression and cruelty, still lingered on. Equally terrifying were tales of the early years of the Reign of Mankind. For three turbulent decades, wars had been waged across the globe as men of great ambition—rulers of the strongest of the newly formed nations—strove to impose their will on their weaker neighbors. The slaughter had been past reckoning.
Gradually, order had been restored. A new civilization had been painstakingly created: a perfect Society, magnificently static. It had been designed to endure for a thousand thousand years. It must endure. It was a Society not only of laws, but of minds and hearts. It taught Men how to think.
And yet—the fear of a New Empire rising continued to haunt them all, the one subject that decent people seldom discussed, but could never quite banish from their minds.
Wilrowan remembered when he was a student at Malachim, he had attended a number of midnight gatherings at a neighboring college, at which some of the bolder students actually dared to discuss some of the ways a ruthless leader might go about building an empire of his own. Will emerged from these meetings feeling profoundly shaken, but also immensely stimulated—as though he had been allowed to witness some gross indecent act, which both repelled and fascinated him. An anonymous paper on the subject was even circulated through the various colleges at the university. To no one’s surprise, the paper was suppressed as soon as it came to the attention of the authorities, and everyone involved was instantly expelled. Unfortunately for Will, some of his friends had been deeply implicated, and though innocent himself for once in his life, those associations had counted against him later.
“The danger may not come from any direction we might expect,” he said, staring down at the map. “It could even originate as far away as—Nordfjail.” He turned suddenly toward Dionee. “You told me it was your own idea to surprise the ambassador—but was there nothing Lord Vault did or said that suggested the scheme to begin with?”
She wrinkled her brow, trying to remember. “He mentioned the Chaos Machine in a general way, wondering how old it was and where it was made, but it
was Rufus Macquay who said that it might be amusing—” She stopped and shook her head emphatically. “No, Will, no. There can’t be a connection between your duel and what happened afterward.”
“You think not?” he said grimly. “I was supposed to be dead or languishing in Whitcomb Gaol, and you were to go to the embassy with a less diligent escort.” He gave a short, humorless laugh. “And even when nothing fell out as planned, I was still obliged to leave Hawkesbridge rather than face His Majesty’s wrath.”
Rodaric and Dionee exchanged a significant glance: surprised on his part, chagrined on hers. “I lied to you, Will,” she said in a very small voice. “But it seemed such a harmless deception, how was I to know it would end so badly?”
Wilrowan blinked. “You lied to me—how? You told me the king was in a rage, you said he had all but banished me—was none of that true?”
“Rodaric had scolded me, but not about you. When Barnaby told him you challenged Sir Rufus only because he insulted Lili, he said what you had done was—was entirely understandable.”
At this point, the king interrupted her. “I don’t recall that I said precisely that. But I did indicate that Wilrowan’s misdeeds might possibly be overlooked this one time. Why did you tell him otherwise?”
“Because I wanted him out of the way. He would have spoiled everything if he knew what I was planning.”
Will ground his teeth. “So I would have done. My compliments, Dionee. You have apparently succeeded in doing Macquay’s work for him, and in doing so, have undoubtedly brought disaster on us all.” He flexed his hands. “I have half a mind to take you by the throat and strangle you.”
But then, catching sight of the king, he added under his breath: “With His Majesty’s permission, of course.”
“Thank you, Wilrowan, that won’t be necessary,” Rodaric answered coldly. “I know she has lied to you and treated you abominably, but I’ll thank you not to forget when you address her that she is the queen.” He turned away from the map, led the way back into his study. “I suppose,” he said, with a sigh, to Dionee, “that I might have stopped you from committing this folly as well as Wilrowan.”