by David Drake
Garric kneaded his wrists. The soft cord hadn't chafed his skin, but his fingers tingled as blood returned to their tips. Though the guards watched him with expressions of bland innocence, they were tautly ready to hurl themselves on Garric if he suddenly attacked their master.
“Lord Waldron arrived a few moments ago, sir,” the majordomo said. He nodded toward the chamber's other door. “I put him in the buttery since I didn't think you'd want him waiting in the main hall. Shall I—”
“Sister take the man!” Royhas snarled, the first honest emotion Garric had seen him offer. “Is he a wizard himself, then? The courier must have met him on the way here.”
Maurunus waited with a look of polite attention, his hands still folded. He didn't speak.
Royhas shook his head in exasperation. “Wait for the turn of a glass, then send him through,” he said. “I'll speak with my guest here in private.”
The servant bowed and went out the other door. His steps were so small and quick that he seemed to be gliding.
“Leave us,” Royhas said with a curt gesture to the pair of guards who'd preceded Garric into the chamber. A slight tension at the corners of their mouths was their only sign of protest.
“And shut the door, you fools!” the nobleman shouted at their backs. The second man had swung the panel to the jamb but hadn't fully closed it.
“Well, Master Garric,” Royhas said with a smile Garric would have known was false even without watching Royhas deal with those who served him. “I suppose you're wondering why I've brought you here.”
“I suppose,” Garric said, “that you're hoping to use me as a willing puppet in a plot against King Valence.” He smiled without warmth at the startled nobleman. Garric had met men like Royhas before, in the borough and more often among the drovers and their guards at the Sheep Fair. Fellows like that ran roughshod over everybody who didn't push them back—hard. Garric had learned early that he felt better after a fight than he did after backing down to somebody.
What had been true in Barca's Hamlet was true here in Valles. Royhas could have Garric killed out of hand—but if he'd been willing to do that; Garric would be buried in the grounds of the ancient palace. Garric had nothing to gain by cringing and a good deal to lose, including his self-respect.
“I'm not a traitor!” Royhas said. He'd thought he was dealing with an ignorant peasant—and because he was a nobleman, he didn't realize that a shepherd had more experience than civilized folk about how members of a group jockey for position. Rams or men, it was all the same at the most basic level.
The medallion of King Carus was a warm presence on Garric's chest. Cashel would have known what was happening just as Garric did. Because Garric drew on the memories of his ancient ancestor, though, he also understood how to deal with this particular form of dominance behavior.
He raised an eyebrow as though he were amused by a child denying the obvious.
“Listen, boy—” Royhas said.
“You'd best bring your flunkies back before you next call me 'boy,' Lord Royhas!” Garric said in a voice that made the candle flame quiver. In a quieter tone he went on, “Alternatively, you can treat me as the scion of kings and the man on whom your plot depends. In that case we'll get along better.”
He didn't know how much of that was Garric or-Reise and how much came from Carus, but he did feel the king's personality bellowing with laughter deep in his mind. The guards had taken Garric's sword belt away, but he hooked his thumbs behind his hipbones and splayed his elbows out, grinning at the amazed nobleman.
Royhas was a solidly built man, but he was neither as big nor as young as Garric, and he wasn't as strong by a half. For a moment his face was contorted with anger; then he considered what Garric had said rather than just the fact that a peasant had talked back to him.
In a careful voice Royhas said, “We're all under a degree of strain, Master Garric. My associates and myself are as loyal as any man to King Valence. It's quite obvious that Valence is unable to respond to the threat posed by the queen, however, so we've been forced to consider other courses of action for the sake of the kingdom. And for Valence too, I shouldn't wonder.”
“Go on,” Garric said. Royhas must originally have planned to tell him to agree with whatever Royhas said during the meeting of conspirators and otherwise to keep his mouth shut. Still, if Maurunus had turned over a sand glass the size of those Garric had seen used on shipboard to judge speed against a drag line, there was still a little time to talk.
Royhas grimaced in frustration. He'd been knocked off his line, and he wasn't any happier than a young ram whose fellow had spilled him on the meadow.
Garric smiled. Of course, most years all the young rams were slaughtered come fall. That was something a shepherd understood too.
Royhas probably thought Garric was laughing at him, but he swallowed his anger and said, “The queen is sending her own minions to take over important positions in the city. Gate guards, the customs assessors in the port. The chancellor's office, even. There's always somebody willing to do a monster's dirty work if the money's good enough.”
Garric cleared his throat. Carus' agreement with the last statement was such a fierce, angry surge that for a moment it took Garric's breath away.
“She can't be buying everybody's support,” Garric said as soon as he could. A thought that wasn't entirely his own floated into his consciousness. “Or do the common people support her?”
“Nobody supports the queen!” Royhas said. “She's a demon in all truth, a wizard and worse. Mobs stone her officials, but that just makes it worse. Whatever the reason, riots mean shops are looted and people are mugged because they looked like they had the price of a drink in their purse.”
Someone tapped softly at the door by which the majordomo had left. Royhas looked up and started to speak.
Garric raised a hand to forestall him and said, “My friends? They're to be brought to me immediately.”
Royhas scowled. “I don't even know if they've been found,” he said. “You were our real concern.”
“When you find my friends Liane and Tenoctris,” Garric said, “they're to be treated like the noblewomen they are. Because you're a gentleman, Lord Royhas, I'm not concerned that you'd think of using them as hostages to compel my acquiescence in your plans—but because some of your co-conspirators may not be gentlemen, please make it clear to all concerned that I would fly into a berserk rage if anything of the sort were to happen. I doubt that any number of guards could prevent me from killing the culprit.”
Royhas flashed Garric a smile of some amusement. “I'm not in the habit of taking hostages from peasants, young man,” he said. “Perhaps things are different on Haft.”
Garric laughed aloud. He wasn't hysterical, but the release of tension was greater than the tension itself had seemed a moment before. “No, Lord Royhas,” he said. “Things aren't different: Haft peasants are just as capable of overvaluing themselves as the highest nobles on Ornifal are.”
He nodded to the door. “We should let them in,” he said. “So long as you oppose the queen, we should be able to get along between ourselves.”
Royhas took his position behind the chair at the head of the table and motioned Garric to stand on his immediate right. “Enter!” he said.
Maurunus opened the door, but he stayed outside when the four cowled figures who'd been waiting in the hallway pushed past. The last of them slammed the door behind him, then searched for a bolt. There wasn't one.
“I don't lock myself in to dinner, Sourous,” Royhas said tartly. “If you like, we could meet in the old slave pen in the subcellar.”
“There's no need for names!” Sourous said. He was a surprisingly young man with delicate features, from what Garric could see. Unlike the others, Sourous hadn't thrown back his cowl when the door closed.
“There's every need for names,” Garric said. “Mine is Garric or-Reise of Haft, and I'm a direct descendant of Carus—the last real King of the Isles.”
/> The words weren't his own, though they rang with bell-like clarity from his lips. Carus was speaking through him, but he was speaking the words Garric would have used if he'd had the experience to choose them.
“So you say,” said the first man to enter the room. He had chiseled features and the thick wrists of a swordsman. Though about sixty and the oldest of the five conspirators, he looked extraordinarily fit.
“So the wizard Silyon said, Waldron,” Royhas snapped. “I don't trust that Dalopo savage any more than you do; but since he was right about Master Garric's appearance, I think we have to assume he knew something about the gentleman's provenance as well.”
There was no love lost between these two men. Garric supposed that was an advantage, since he could stand as the keystone between their competing pressures, but he didn't imagine it would make his coming tasks more pleasant.
The plump man in green pulled out a chair and sat. “If we fight among ourselves,” he said, “the queen won't have to waste effort hanging us, will she?”
He spoke with a wheeze. To Garric he seemed more peevish than frightened.
Royhas smiled tightly and nodded to the seated man, “Lord Tadai bor-Tithain,” he said, “and—”
He gestured to the last man, a haggard fellow who looked as though a cancer were eating his bowels.
“—Lord Pitre bor-Piamonas. You've met Waldron and Sourous already, Master Garric.”
“We'll all hang,” Sourous muttered. “Or worse, who knows what that she-demon will do to us? What if one of her fire wraiths appears here right now?”
“What happens if the sun goes out right now?” Waldron said without trying to hide his disgust. He shook his head. “Your father and I had our differences, Sourous, but at least I never doubted that I had a man to deal with!”
Tadai wheezed with laughter. “What did I say?” he remarked to the air. “We should hire ourselves out as buffoons for the Feast of the Lady's Veil.”
“I was explaining to our friend from Haft,” Royhas said, rechanneling the discussion with a skill that Garric could appreciate, “that the danger isn't simply from the queen's hirelings. When she wants to replace the proper officials with her own men, she sends a phantasm with them.”
“They can't do any real harm,” Waldron said in irritation. “They're uncanny, I grant, but nothing that should make a brave man leave his place.”
“Perhaps King Valence should hire only men with the courage of a bor-Walliman to collect his port dues,” Sourous said, his face turned toward the wall. Waldron's hand twitched in the direction of his sword hilt, then checked. The motion was so slight that Garric wouldn't have noticed it without his ancestor reading the tiny cues.
“What do you mean by a phantasm?” Garric said, doing his part to keep the conspiracy from flying apart in mutual insults. If King Valence wanted his life—and there was no reason to doubt Royhas' claim—these men were the best chance Garric and his friends had of surviving for more than the next few hours. “Ghosts?”
Tadai glanced up with the first real interest he'd given anything except his perfect, almond-shaped fingernails. “Demons, I would rather say,” he said, “but only in appearance. As Waldron notes, they don't do anything except look ugly. I might say the same about my wife... and unlike my Trinka, the queen's little friends don't bring a dowry of ten thousand acres.”
“People who've faced them say the phantasms remind them of things,” Royhas said. He flashed the bitter ghost of a smile. “They don't say what memories are involved, but one can make some assumptions from the fact the witnesses refuse to discuss them. I have more sympathy for those who don't choose to resist the queen's hirelings than Waldron does.”
“And there's the fire wraiths,” Pitre muttered. He'd taken a spherical limewood puzzle from his purse and was rotating it between his hands. “They're not harmless!”
“Fagh!” Waldron said. “How many times have they been seen? Four times? Five? In almost a year!”
“Once has always been enough, hasn't it?” Tadai said, looking up from his nails again with an expression of polite inquiry. “For the victim, at least; which seems to me good reason why there've been so few victims. The five of us have certainly chosen to conceal our opposition to the queen.”
Garric glanced at Royhas. Royhas nodded and said, “They—or that, there's never been more than one fire wraith seen at a time—appear near someone who's been opposing the queen in a particularly open fashion. The first was a gang boss named Erengo who was raising a mob to attack the queen's mansion. I dare say he expected to get particularly rich from the loot, once a few hundred cattle from the slums had broken down the defenses.”
Pitre tittered. “He should have hired himself to the queen instead,” he said. “His sort's where she gets most of her servants.”
“Erengo may have come to that conclusion in his last moments,” Royhas said grimly. “He hadn't made any secret about his plans, though he'd intended to be some distance from the actual event. A thing like a fiery lizard on its hind legs appeared out of the air. His bodyguards attacked it with no effect—”
“No useful effect,” Tadai said sardonically. “I gather it made quite a colorful display.”
Waldron looked down at the seated man with a cold expression and a tightness in his sword arm. Tadai folded his hands in his lap, pursing his lips slightly.
Garric guessed it would take a great deal of irritation before Waldron lost his temper enough to physically attack a co-conspirator. It was a silly risk to take for no purpose, though, and this business already involved risk aplenty.
“The fire wraith put its arms around Erengo's neck,” Royhas continued. “It burned him to a blob of greasy ash. Then the wraith vanished again.”
“The common herd would follow King Valence if he'd just lead them!” Pitre said, hunched over his puzzle. His fingers were recombining the separated pieces into a sphere. “Everyone hates the queen, even the scum who work for her.”
“And Silyon could protect King Valence!” Sourous said, sounding like a child in his eagerness to believe what he hoped was true. “After all, the queen would have disposed of him if he weren't protected, wouldn't she?”
Tenoctris might be able to answer that question. Garric couldn't, but he knew that there were fights that you avoided as long as possible even if you thought you could win them. That might be why the queen hadn't attacked Valence directly—and it was even more likely that Valence feared that was why the queen had held back.
“My colleagues and I are loyal subjects of King Valence,” Royhas said with a tinge of irony. “We've been forced to consider alternative ways to preserve the kingdom—”
Through Garric's mind ran the thought Their part of the kingdom. He grinned wryly.
“—and when Valence told me to dispose of the would-be usurper I'd find in the grounds of the Tyrants' palace, the possibility of a way forward occurred to us.”
“So you claim to be Countess Tera's heir, boy?” Tadai asked. He was no more supercilious to Garric than he was to his fellow nobles; but Garric wasn't one of Tadai's fellow nobles.
Garric placed his left hand flat on the table and leaned onto it, bringing his face closer to Tadai's. “I'm a free citizen of Haft, fat man,” he said pleasantly. “And my lineage goes back to Carus, though the place where you'd find the proof of that isn't one you'd return from—even if you could get there.”
In Garric's memory, a black throne rose from a black plain into a black sky: the Throne of Malkar, the source of all evil and of universal power. Lorcan, the first King of the Isles, had hidden the throne where only his descendants could find it... as Garric had found it, in a nightmare whose illusions were real enough to kill the soul.
Tadai said nothing. He drew a handkerchief of green and black silk from his left sleeve and wiped his forehead. His hair was so fair that in brighter light he would seem to be bald.
Pitre flung down the bits of his puzzle. “Where did he come from?” he said to Royhas. “M
ay the Lady shield me! This isn't the bumpkin from a sheepwalk you told us you were bringing!”
“He's the man Valence told me to watch for!” Royhas said. “The name was right, the age was right. We've never doubted Silyon was a powerful wizard, have we? He was right!”
“I think...” said Tadai. He carefully folded the handkerchief away as everyone watched him.
“I think Valence was right to fear that this youth could usurp his throne—with the right backing,” he continued. Tadai's tone was still light, but the mockery was gone. “And I think we were right, gentlemen—”
He looked around the taut faces of his fellows.
“—to believe that he could rouse the populace against the queen in a directed fashion, as Valence will not.”
Garric's legs were wobbly, but it was probably because of Carus that he chose to pull out the chair in front of him and sit. They had to break the tension. This last exchange had sent the nobles' minds spinning in more directions than there were men in the room.
“Talk to me like a peasant from Haft who doesn't know anything about the queen and why King Valence married her,” Garric said calmly. He gestured the others to seats with an assurance that made him marvel—but they all obeyed, even Royhas, whose house it was. “But I can start by saying that I have no designs on the throne of the Isles so long as Valence is on it.”
He grinned. “I'm a loyal citizen too, albeit Valence seems to have been misinformed on the matter.”
Garric's grammar and diction were as good as those of any man in the Isles. Reise had seen to that, with a fierce determination that no paid schoolmaster could have matched. Still, his voice had a lilt that would always set him apart from the clipped accents of Ornifal or a Sandrakkan burr. That was as surely a mark of Haft today as it had been in the time of King Carus.
“The princess Azalais was the daughter of the King of Sirimat,” Pitre said. Garric had expected Tadai or Royhas to take up the story. “Valence had just fought the Earl of Sandrakkan for the throne—”
“For the title,” Waldron spat. “It could have been a real throne if he'd been a real man.”
