They rode through a low outer wall that closed off several blocks; it was mostly ornamental, which meant that the Counts didn’t feel the need for a real fortification between them and the citizenry, though at need they could always retire to the castle. A small guard of halberdiers clashed the butts of their polished weapons down outside the gates; she was glad to see the Count wasn’t wasting manpower. The cast-bronze lions there looked more recent than most of the decor.
“Made here in Walla Walla in my father’s day, my lady, may God receive his soul,” de Aguirre said proudly as they dismounted and varlets ran to take their horses. “We have a fine foundry and good artists.”
Tiphaine nodded; she was already running over what she would say to the assembled local magnates.
Not to mention I’m hungry. A hunk of bread and cheese in the saddle isn’t much of a lunch, particularly when you had dog biscuit and jerky for breakfast.
The gilt-bronze and mahogany and marble splendors of the lobby had been carefully updated; the hiss of gaslights overhead might almost have been Todenangst. Everyone parted with more bows. She thanked . . . whatever was Up There . . . inwardly that this was an emergency. The full panoply of courtly etiquette had always bored her like an auger, however necessary it was to keeping the wheels greased, and a painstaking provincial imitation was even worse.
The housekeeper showed her to a third-floor suite. Sir Rodard was at the door, with a towel over one armored arm.
“This isn’t your job anymore,” Tiphaine pointed out; then she sighed slightly as she used the hot damp cloth to wipe her face; the momentary coolness afterwards was even more welcome.
Rodard shrugged. “I’m still a household knight of yours, my lady,” he said. “And it’s a bit late to train an immediate replacement as body-squire.”
He bowed her through. Lioncel was standing there directing a couple of pages and Walla Walla varlets with lordly insouciance as they unpacked and laid things out. He knelt, undid her sword belt and added it to the rest of her gear on an armor stand. The half-armor and her riding boots came off with equal efficiency, while she looked around and moved as necessary. The first Count’s architects had probably knocked three or four suites together to make these guest quarters; excellent rugs that looked Indian of some sort, burnished furniture, chandeliers with their candles already lit in the gathering dusk, adding the scent of a lavish display of fine beeswax to the flowers in many vases. There was an ornamental but very practical set of wroughtsteel bars set over all the windows, fine smithwork giving them the appearance of leafy grapevines.
Rodard had some of her papers already neatly set out on a half-acre desk, and her seal and a supply of colored wax to hand. There were even typewriters and adding machines in an alcove for anyone who had their accountants along. It hadn’t been worth the trouble to bring in hers, since it was already so late and she was leaving in the morning. The last light was fading from the windows and glimmers of flame were showing across the city, gaslights and alcohol lanterns for the public buildings and homes of the rich; workaday tallow dips and canola oil for the rest. The city-glow was brighter than usual; mostly people went to bed with the sun, but the emergency meant they’d be working into the night.
“Quick work,” she said to Rodard. “I wasn’t sure you’d get here before I did, with the state the streets were in.”
“Easier for a nameless knight and party to move through the streets than a Grand Constable, a Marchwarden and a Count, with three conroi of lancers behind them, my lady,” Rodard said. “Incidentally it was Lioncel who suggested we just get the gear moving, trot the packhorses around to the east gate, and then ask for the details when we got here rather than trying to follow you. Saved a fair bit of time.”
He winked as he said it; he’d have done exactly the same thing, but it was an excellent sign that it had occurred to the youngest squire as well.
Lioncel bowed, blushing with pride. “Your bath is drawn, my lady,” he said. A quick grin: “This is the highest floor with running water and a boiler. I checked. The top eight are all used for storage with cranes and treadmills for hauling things up the old elevator shafts. Family quarters below us, staff housing and offices on the fourth.”
“Good work,” she said, and restrained an impulse to scoop a bound report off the desk as she passed. “Get me a drink—beer, cold if possible.”
He put it into her hand just as she threw the arming doublet behind her; that had been a safe bet for anyone who knew her. She walked into the bathing room through a bead curtain. The marble tub not only held steaming water but aromatically scented suds, and there was a pleasant cross-breeze from windows on two sides of the corner room. This was going to be a pleasant memory in a few weeks; she’d always been fastidiously clean when she could be, which in her line of work wasn’t all the time. The beer was icy-chilled and very good; some of the best hops in the . . .
Montival, she thought. Got to start thinking of it that way. Not just the Association territories anymore.
. . . High Kingdom were grown around here. That and the hot water managed to relax her enough to almost doze for a few minutes of soaking. At thirty-eight she could still do nearly everything she’d been able to do at twenty, but she found it took more and more effort plus recuperation was slower, and the last weeks had been hard. A sputtering jerk brought her head up as it slipped below the surface.
There was even a genuine sponge to go with the lavender-scented local soap, which was true luxury these days. Scrubbing briskly helped her back to alertness.
It beats washing with a cloth and a helmet full of water all to hell, she thought as she climbed out. Damn, but I wish this war was over and won.
The floor was some sort of slightly coarse-surfaced stone, easy under her feet and not slippery. She stood and looked at herself in the full-length mirror with a coldly objective eye, and at last nodded satisfaction. Naked she looked less slim than she did in clothes or armor, and the startling muscle definition was clearer. At just a hair under five-ten she weighed a solid hundred and fifty, and she’d never been more than a few pounds either side of that since she got her full growth. Of course, she’d spent a lot of that time doing very energetic things while wearing fifty pounds or more of steel strapped all over her body, besides conscientious training and recreations that included hunting boar, bear and tiger with spears.
“Conrad’s right,” she murmured; the conversation with Rigobert had reminded her of her youth, and so had the ceremonies that marked passages in the cycle of life. “I’m a big blond horse of a woman and I’d never, ever have made it to the Olympics as a gymnast. They were all little pixies and even at thirteen I was getting too tall. Pentathlon, maybe, if I’d switched to track and field in time. Still, I was good.”
She’d kept it up, too; on impulse she bent backward until her palms were on the floor behind her feet, brought one leg up and pointed the toe at the ceiling, then the other so that she was on both hands. Then a ninety-degree side-split, a scissors flip back upright onto the balls of her feet and a tucked back salto flip ending with her arms raised in that rather silly but obligatory ballerinalike posture you used to finish a floor routine—
That brought her face-to-face with the maid who’d just come through the doorway, with a pile of towels in her arms and a bulge-eyed expression at finding a naked and wetly glistening Grand Constable falling out of a midair somersault right in front of her. They were close enough that Tiphaine could feel the warmth of the heated fabric.
“Yes?” she said.
“MyladyIwassenttoattendyouasyouhavenomaid—” came out in a rush.
“Leave the towels,” she said calmly.
“Yyyyyes, m’lady.”
Tiphaine sighed inwardly as the girl set the heap of fluffy white fabric on a stone bench and knotted her fingers together.
I don’t know what’s more irritating, the usual goggling horror, or the occasional come-on.
“That will be all,” she said patiently. “You m
ay go. My body-squire and pages will attend me.”
Hmmm. Bit of a pout along with the curtsy and swift withdrawal. Irritation Number Two, I think. Higamous hogamous, I am very monogamous.
Since she was alone, she allowed herself a very slight grin as she toweled down. Delia was fond of playing a game involving a lot of running and giggling she called “The Lustful Knight and the Innocent Country Maid” in honor of their first meeting at the feast when Tiphaine had taken seisin of Barony Ath during the Protector’s War. It was always fun, especially when Tiphaine returned from a long absence.
“Now granted, I was a newly made knight, and I was both lustful and fairly thoroughly drunk by that point, but it was definitely Delia who murmured an invitation to inspect the fine embroidery on her underwear into my ear. Not that I needed to be asked twice in that state,” she added to herself.
She tucked one of the towels around herself under the armpits as she walked out into the bedroom. Lioncel discreetly turned and looked out the window as she tossed it aside and pulled on the briefs, bias-cut linen sports bra and silver-gray silk shirt with a high mandarin collar and loose sleeves tied at the wrist. Then he whistled sharply for the pages over whom he now had authority—the general rule was that pages helped you put on clothes, and squires helped you don armor—and oversaw the younger boys as they helped her into semiformal dress. Assistance in dressing was something she’d finally gotten used to; it helped that this style really required it.
That started with the hose, also skintight and bias-cut; Sandra had told her once that it was amusing beyond words that the macho toughs of the warrior aristocracy had all ended up shaving their legs and wearing something quite close to pre-Change panty hose.
It is funny, if you think of it that way. I’d forgotten what panty hose were . . . and she didn’t say, but I think part of the gleam in her eye was that it means I shave my legs and wear panty hose too, of course, which also wouldn’t have happened without the end of the world.
Her hose were onyxine black, as was the sleeveless neck-to-thigh jerkin of butter-soft doeskin that went on next, fastened up the front with ties of braided black silk. Her shoes were black chamois as well, except for the gold buckles that secured them at each ankle, and the toes turned up—moderately, not the exaggerated length that high Court fashion decreed. The loose black knee-length houppelande overrobe had obsidian buttons and a collar open at the front and ear-high behind; the lower hem was dagged, and so were the turned-back sleeves that hung almost as low, showing the rich dark forest-green jacquard lining.
She put her arms out horizontally while the pages fastened the belt of tooled black leather around her waist. The purse on one side was largely ornamental, but the dagger on the other was ten inches long and fully functional, for all the tooling and silver cutwork on the sheath.
Lioncel insisted on getting on a stool and combing her hair, though strictly speaking that was no longer his duty, and carefully placed the chaperon hat of the nobility on her head. It was round and black, with a broad brim of rolled cloth and a long flat green tail called a liripipe down the back; he arranged the end over her right shoulder. Then he gave the livery badge above her brow a quick buff; it was Sandra’s arms quartered with her own.
Two pages brought a flat carrying case. Lioncel used a key to open it, and drew out the gold chain of office he placed around her neck; with similar reverence he pinned the knot of ribbons that was Delia’s favor on her upper sword-arm.
“You can carry the sword, Lioncel,” she said.
He started to grin and then composed his face gravely though his blue eyes sparkled with excitement; he’d managed to make himself quite presentable, too, in a dark brown outfit with a squire’s brimless flowerpot hat.
You didn’t wear a long sword to a formal meal; not these days, when Eaters or enemies were less likely to crawl down the chimney or burst through the door between the soup and the main course waving rusty kitchen knives and lusting for your flesh or at least your dinner and shoes. But a squire would carry hers behind her with the belt wound around the scabbard, sign of the High Justice and her jurisdiction throughout the Association by right of office. It was a more practical reminder than a gold chain with a heraldic medallion, since the hilt would be within reaching distance. And in the Association they didn’t bother to deny that Justice carried a sword.
“Sir Rodard,” she added as she signed the pages away and picked a rose out of a vase, trimming it and threading the stem through a buttonhole, leaving the great red bloom at her throat. “Did you send that girl in with the towels?”
“Yes, of course, my lady,” he said, coming through the door and looking her over critically. “Splendid, my lady. Just the right touch of the sinister amid the dark elegance.”
“Why did you do that, may I ask?”
“Modesty, my lady. It wouldn’t be fitting for a man to carry the towels into your bathing chamber.”
“Rodard, how many times have we ended up squatting over the same trench in the field?”
“This is the City Palace of the Counts of the Eastermark, my lady.”
“Bullshit. I think it was your perverse sense of humor.”
“I have been well trained in skill and courtesy, my lady.”
Tiphaine’s face was blank save for a very slight lift of the eyebrow at the unspoken, by you.
Rodard had changed out of the plain set of battle armor; he’d be sharing the watches outside her door, but right now he was in a modest, sober set of gentlemen’s evening garments, a simpler version of what she was wearing. With a sword, though, and she knew that particular outfit had a lining of very fine mesh-mail in the houppelande. He and his brother were very good swordsmen; she’d trained them herself, passing on what Sandra’s instructors had drilled into her along with a fund of lethal experience that spanned two decades now. Along with many other skills.
“Armand’s on duty right now, isn’t he?”
“Yes, my lady.”
“Good. Get a crossbow; ordinary Armory pattern issue model. No quarrels, just the bow. Bundle it up and put it somewhere in the dining hall we’ll be going to. Get it done right now, then tell Lioncel where it is before we go in.”
“At once, my lady,” he said and was gone.
“My lady?” Lioncel said.
“Was that a question, squire?”
“No, my lady.”
There was a stamp and clash outside the door when she left; five crossbowmen in three-quarter armor came to attention, and three men-at-arms headed by Armand. She returned the salute and nodded aside slightly. The new-made knight stepped close enough not to be overheard.
“How would you get into those guest chambers, Sir Armand?”
Armand had the curved semicircular visor of his sallet helm up; it stuck out like the brim of a billed cap as he turned his head thoughtfully upward.
“Up the old elevator shafts to the storage levels,” he said after a tensecond pause. “If they’re anything like what I’ve seen in pre-Change buildings elsewhere they’ll be very climbable.”
Then another pause, and: “Hide until around three o’clock in the morning, then rappel down to one of the windows of the suite I wanted. A diamond-coated cutting cable would go through those grills in a few minutes; they’re just mild steel. I’d have used alloy there, myself, even if it’s harder to work into pretty vines.”
“How long?”
“The trip down and getting into the suite, fifteen minutes. Depending on how alert my lord the Count’s guards are; but usually, men don’t look up.”
“My thoughts exactly. Your suggestion?”
“Four men awake at all times in our quarters, moving in pairs between the rooms in the guest suite, beside the guard on the door here.”
“See to it. And would you have any difficulty in getting into the palace, given the perimeter wall and security arrangements you saw?”
“My lady, it’s commendable that the Count feels no need of any great precautions against his
people.”
“Plain English, please, Sir Armand. Could you get in, and unobserved?”
“My lady, Rodard or I could do that at any time of day or night. Naked, while riding on a grizzly bear and playing a mandolin.”
“My thoughts exactly, for the second time.”
Lord Rigobert met her at the top of the main staircase. He was in much the same type of outfit as she, except that his houppelande and hose were parti-colored, scarlet on the right and pale gold on the left, and the liripipe was much longer, reaching to the level of his belt of gold links wrought in twining patterns with cabucon-cut garnets for the grapes. She had to admit that he could carry it off magnificently, and it went well with the arrogant jut of his short golden beard and large, shapely but scarred warrior hands. He bowed her forward, giving her a step’s precedence.
“Lord Rigobert,” she said quietly over her shoulder.
They walked downward past an honor guard on the landing where the staircase turned to the ground floor; that was the family quarters, and she was pleased to see strong grillwork doors on either side, evidently closed and guarded at night.
Not totally trusting. Or his father wasn’t, and established the routine.
“Yes, my lady?”
“Does it strike you that this city is probably swarming with every possible variety of enemy agent?”
“Not a bit, Lady Tiphaine,” Rigobert said. “The influx of refugees and troops from everywhere on our side and other strangers and general confusion would make it nearly impossible for anyone to slip in unnoticed.”
“Ha ha big fucking ha, Rigobert, everyone’s a court jester tonight.”
“My guard captain is taking precautions, entirely serious ones.”
“So is mine, but we need to talk to the Count after the dinner; I don’t think he’s considered the implications of us all being here for this one night.”
As promised, the dinner was relatively small and select. The dining chamber was medium-sized, and windowless; the gaslights on their bright, expensive incandescent mantels showed murals of sporting scenes set in the Blue Mountains on the walls, with hounds coursing a stag on one side and a grizzly bear at bay before hunters with spears on the other. Those were far enough from the T-shaped table that she was fairly confident that nobody could eavesdrop through hidden grills, even with a focusing horn behind it.
Emberverse 08: The Tears of the Sun Page 51
