The Misrule series Box Set

by Andy Graham

  Former Captain Ray Franklin

  Corporal Karlyne Brooke

  Tino Martinez (veteran)

  Captain Reza Aalok (deceased)

  Sergeant Ernest Hamid (deceased)

  Skovsky Junior (deceased)

  The 13th Legion (The Unsung)

  Captain James Brennan

  Corporal Seth

  Sub-corporal Jamerson Nascimento

  Sub-corporal Baris Orr

  Others

  Field-Marshal Willa Chester

  Jann Rainehoff - Chester’s PA

  Sci-Captain James (deceased) - Lind’s son.

  Captain Lacky - chief of President Laudanum’s security team. Saved by Rick Franklin in the Castle Brecan incident.

  The Mennai

  Aerfen (deceased)

  Deian - Aerfen’s father (deceased)

  About this edition

  This book was first published as Rose: A Mother’s Unreason. (The Lords of Misrule: Book Three)

  This 2018 edition has been re-edited and re-covered. Some of the places within the series have been renamed.

  The story remains the same: a mother’s fight to save her sons from themselves.

  Copyright & Disclaimer

  Copyright © Andrew Graham 2017

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be used, reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by information storage or retrieval system, without the written permission of the author, except where permitted by law, or in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

  This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance between the characters in it and real people, events or organisations is entirely co-incidental.

  A LOVER’S REDEMPTION

  The Misrule: Book Three

  1

  Lesau Rising

  Randall Soulier, vice president of Ailan and a man with bloody promotion on his mind, stormed into his superior’s office. The door shuddered on its hinges as the heavy boots of his 13th legionnaires stamped in his wake. There was a struggle, brief and fierce. Two guards died. A third would soon wish for the same fate.

  The cold, clinical detachment Randall had felt under the streets of the Bridged Quarter of Tye was gone. Rose Franklin, his mother, was dead by his hand. Ray Franklin, his half-brother, was locked up in the old cells, waiting on Randall’s displeasure. And now he, Randall Soulier, got to deal with Bethina Laudanum permanently. The president of Ailan had taken too many liberties, robbed him of too much respect, upended his past. This was Randall’s time. His future. He could rewrite his family history from this point on.

  “Who’s that?” A woman’s voice.

  She’s here. Near the window. His breath caught in his throat. Deep in the rash of fear and excitement that clouded his mind was a quiet whisper: Am I really going to do this?

  “Sir?” Captain James Brennan, Randall’s second in command, his pocket thug and chief enforcer, offered him a syringe. A bead of purple fluid bulged out of the needle point. Brennan’s forehead was grooved with a deep V-shape. His thinking look. His worried look. An ugly look. At least it ruined the similarity between Brennan and his sister. For that, Randall was thankful. It helped preserve the ferocious memories of nubile young Lena, of her long limbs tangled in Randall’s lust-soaked bedsheets. The memories soured. Lena was dead. Murdered yards from Randall’s home while the sheets were still warm.

  Brennan’s flat gaze was fixed on Randall, the syringe quivering in his hand. What do you see when you see me, Brennan? Your sister? Do you see her in my bed, or murdered by that excuse of a woman, the Famulus?

  The purple bead of liquid burst. It hit the wooden floor, breaking Brennan’s gaze and putting a slouch in the man’s spine. Even a man as emotionally ruined as Brennan would find the death of a little sister hard to take. That, Randall decided, was a problem for later. He laid a hand on his captain’s arm and pushed the syringe away. “Not the drugs. I’ll deal with Bethina myself.” The answer to the questioning whisper in his head, it seemed, was: Yes, I am going to do this.

  The president was illuminated by the smaller of the two moons. The other was obscured by Bethina’s Folly Tree — a tree on a balcony at the top of a skyscraper. She’d claimed it was a representation of what should and shouldn’t be. For Randall, it would serve a different purpose. A frown flitted across Bethina’s face as she crossed her legs. It was an oddly prim mannerism from her. “Oh, it’s you,” she said, placing a sheaf of papers into the red leather binder on her lap.

  “Just following orders, ma’am. I came within the hour, as you requested.”

  One of the president’s fingers drifted up to pull at the mole on the end of her nose. Her eyes cut left, took in Brennan’s lifeless face, the freshly chipped tooth of the legionnaire beside him. “I don’t think you—”

  The door slammed open and two dogs barrelled in from the balcony. The Folly Tree strained against the gusting wind. The office was filled with flat-eared growls. Shots rang out. One animal collapsed in a whimpering heap as the second launched itself at the chip-toothed legionnaire. The man stumbled and fell. Hands beat at the dog. Grabbed lumps of fur. The thunder of automatic fire skewered the animal and hurled it into a corner. The legionnaire clawed at his throat, gurgling, choking on his own blood. His colleagues ignored him. Randall stepped over the man, careful not to get his shoes messy.

  “Oh my.” Bethina clutched the binder to her chest, a shield of red leather and old paper. “Randall, I really don’t think you—”

  Her words choked off into a gurgling squeak as he wrenched her off the sofa. His fingers clamped round her neck. He squeezed the skin under her jaw. It felt like velvet, just like he had imagined. The binder fell. Loose pages see-sawed in the air. Her nails scratched across his hands, carving criss-crossed lines into his tendons.

  Squeeze.

  Harder.

  Tighter.

  The angle of her jaw rammed into his knuckles. The Folly Tree thrashed at the sky, its leaves gold in the moonlight. Whirlpools of grey clouds spun beneath the stars. The burning sensation built in his forearms. Bethina’s struggling weakened as his fingertips numbed.

  “Stop.” Her words leaked past blue lips. “You don’t under—”

  “Shut up.” He dragged up every slight, threat and insult, no matter how big or small, no matter from whom or about what. The thump of her heels was fading. He grit his teeth. A bone in her throat snapped and her hands slipped off his wrists, thudding to the floor.

  The tree branches on the balcony stilled. The plaintive wail of sirens rose and fell in the distance. North, a plume of red-tinted smoke drifted into the night, staining the sky above the dead city of Tye. Still straddling the woman, the air rattled out of Randall’s lungs. How long had he been holding his breath? It felt like all his life. “Get a rope.”

  As the Unsung legionnaires set to work, Randall helped himself to a drink. Cheap crap that curdled on his tongue but was wet and alcoholic. He picked up the antique phone receiver from her desk.

  “Hello?”

  Wait. Let her stew.

  “Beth? Is that you?”

  Let her sweat.

  “Bethina, are you—”

  “Field-Marshal Chester,” he said.

  There was a hissing intake of breath through the receiver.

  “I do hope you’re feeling better,” Randall lied. “Such an unfortunate incident with that gas canister in your apartment. Someone could have died.”

  “Someone did die, you bastard.”

  “Accidents happen, Chester.”

  “Accidents?” she screamed down the phone.

  Randall’s foot squelched in something red. Blood from the chipped-toothed legionnaire was pooling under the desk, mixing with the dog’s. The pulse in the man’s neck fluttered weakly. One of his colleagues knelt by him, medi-kit ready. Randall waved him away. “Yes, Chester. Accidents.” His irritation was growing:
with Brennan for his brooding silence, with the legionnaire for bleeding on his shoe, with Chester for still being alive.

  “You—” Not screaming now, just furious and hateful.

  “No, you, Chester. Not me. You. You need to discharge yourself from your sickbed and come to the president’s private office immediately.”

  “How dare you talk to me like— What? Beth’s office? What’s wrong? Is she OK?”

  A chair clattered to the balcony floor outside. Two feet swung centimetres above that floor. One had lost a shoe; it was hiding under the chair. A long shadow clung to those feet, stretching into the night. The wind picked up. The tree branches swayed their lament. The shadow hanging across the flagstones rocked with them, in time with the spittle-mouthed, bug-eyed pendulum dangling from the Folly Tree.

  “It appears that our president’s past has caught up with her,” Randall said. “The guilt must have been too much. We were too late. Her dogs were mad, killed one of my men.” A red bubble burst in the dying legionnaire’s mouth as he finally choked to death. “We had to shoot the filthy animals.”

  “Randall?” Chester’s voice was cut with panic.

  He let the moment linger and took a swig of the alcohol. It burnt all the way to his toes. “Bethina Laudanum has committed suicide. I am now president.”

  2

  Remembering Rose

  As the chopper juddered into the air, the river fog curled back around the statues of the Stone Bridge. Piece by piece, the sculptures disappeared — a leg here, an arm there, the fingers clutching a scroll, an upraised sword. The fog suffocated the long dead kings and queens of Ailan, turning them into disembodied ghosts. They became something out of the stories Stann Taille had once told around the Hallowtide fires of Tear, though none of the stories he had ever told could rival the horror of what he’d just witnessed. “Rose Franklin is dead,” Stann muttered. “Killed by her eldest son. Doesn’t get much more wrong that that, does it?”

  The rattling of the chopper was the only reply.

  Beneath him, a handful of stone crowns and tiaras poked out of the grey mist. An expanse of flat sky stretched away from him, flickering orange, yellow and gold, lit by the burning city below. Stann knuckled away a tear. He’d refused to grieve when the news had come that his son had been shot for deserting his unit in a war zone. That would have meant Donarth really was dead. Worse, that he’d let his friends down. But Rose Franklin? She’d been a good woman — headstrong, determined and fierce. A woman who had lived what she believed. She’d put herself on the line despite knowing the risks. She’d refused to cower behind the suits and skirts who lied to all the spineless wonders who ‘just wanted to get along in life’, those people who traded uncomfortable truths for a shot at shelter. But even in her darkest nightmares, Rose could never have envisaged a fate like this.

  The helicopter lurched, cracking Stann’s head against a window. He grabbed a pair of headphones. “C’mon, Skovsky. You forget to take the handbrake off this thing?”

  A voice crackled back at him. “You forget what funny means? That joke’s even older than we are.”

  Stann shifted his leg into a more comfortable position. The trek through the tunnels under Tye had taken its toll. The mangled flesh of his thigh was sending throbbing waves of pain up his spine.

  His headphones hissed. “What happened back there?”

  “The usual when you mix guns and a grudge.”

  “Shooting and dying?”

  “Too much of both,” Stann replied. The chopper jumped. “Try and avoid the pot holes, OK?”

  “Would sir like an umbrella in his drink, too?”

  “Just a pilot that can fly in a straight line.”

  “They’re the ones that get you killed,” Skovsky said. “You want a pilot that can duck and barrel roll. They’re the ones that keep you alive.”

  The chopper slid out of the clouds. Twinkling lights blanketed the city beneath Stann: skyscrapers tipped with flashing red dots, lines of viridescent green and ground-bound stars of white. The colours stopped abruptly at the murky black line that was the River Tenns. It separated Effrea from its northern neighbour, Tye. The latter, a city gutted in the Silk Revolution some forty-odd years ago, was burning again. The quiet that had hung over it like a shroud for almost half a century was shredded. Stann could have sworn he could hear the giant beams of wood popping and crackling, as buildings collapsed in on themselves. His stomach dropped. Whether that was Skovsky Senior wrestling with the chopper, Rose’s fate or the thought of Ray Franklin and the others trying to escape that inferno, he wasn’t sure.

  The thrum of the chopper’s engine changed. “Where we going?” Stann asked.

  “I’m to take you back to the Morgen Towers.”

  “Those cursed tin boxes stuck out in the South Sea? Not a chance. I know why they were deserted. I met one of the survivors way back when.”

  “Captain Namoor?”

  “Yup. He’s still afraid of bread knives. Take me to where Axeford used to be, I know the area. I can hide in the Weeping Woods.” The giant distillers’ barrel will do for a while, he thought. Rest up, let the leg recover and maybe have a rummage around and see what the distillers left behind. Maybe some spirits to help the healing, maybe even some guns to help the hurting.

  “Can’t do that, Stann. I got orders.”

  “From who?”

  “Rose Franklin herself.”

  “She’s dead.” The chopper didn’t waver. Skovsky was an old man, but he’d served and lost a child over what may as well have been a political typo. He was the type of old man who performed better under stress than when the stakes were low. “Randall Soulier killed her,” Stann continued. “I got a feeling he wants the president’s job a little too much.”

  “Never liked him.” The headphones and noise of the rotors stripped the emotion out of Skovsky’s voice. It was all the more menacing for it. “Never cared much for people who’ve bought or bribed their way to power. They’re almost as bad as them that inherited it.”

  Stann kept quiet and let his silence do the questioning for him.

  “Guess we’d better stop him then.” Skovsky’s voice hissed in Stann’s headphones. “You sure it was wise to let your grandson and the others stay?”

  Stann’s eyes, sniper’s eyes, strained to see through the mist choking the Stone Bridge. It was the size of his hand now. The bridge connected Effrea, the capital of Ailan, and the spreading inferno that was cremating Tye. As the wail and flash of police cars and army vehicles arrived at the Effrea end of the bridge, Stann imagined he could see three tiny figures racing into the streets: Ray, Dr Stella Swann and her husband, Dan.

  “They’re all grown-ups. Can do what they want, I reckon. And that Dr Swann’s got bigger balls than most men I know. They’ll be OK. You’d better be OK, Ray,” he added to himself. “You’re the only family I got left.”

  3

  Remembering The Past

  Ray Franklin flattened himself into the alley wall. The smell of stale piss and damp brick filled his nose. To one side, the warmth of Stella Swann’s arm pressed into his; to the other, the feverish shivering of her husband’s.

  “We need to get Dan help,” Stella whispered.

  A blue light cut through the darkness of the alley, glancing off Stella’s face. She was drawn and haggard. The last twenty-four hours had aged her by the same number of years.

  Shouts echoed from the River Tenns:

  “Seal the area.”

  “Get on the bridge.”

  “Search the houses.”

  “Get off the bridge.”

  Stay here.

  Go there.

  Do this.

  Do that.

  The rumble of fire trucks vibrated through Ray’s feet. The clank of steel and thud of boots hitting the ground turned the commands into garbled noise. The echoes blended, twisted, feeding back on themselves. They merged with the chaos in his brain. The crack of steel became the endless retort of the shot that ha
d killed his mother.

  He screwed his eyes shut. Rose was dead. His mother. It felt like the end of the world.

  Blue light filtered through the pink skin of his eyelids. His mind’s eye saw home: the village of Tear and the ruined building his mother had grown up in. Its thatched roof was burnt and patchy. The handle of a water pump was rusted solid, the green paint chipped and flecked with white. Ray felt a hand slip into his as a voice slipped into his mind, Rose’s voice.

  “The end of the world?” his mother said. “It isn’t a single event. Nor is it one death, no matter how much that life means. The end of the world will be insidious and quiet. Things and people will slowly be taken away from us. One at a time, we’ll lose our rights. Some will be reclassified as privileges, other as subversive.

  “Arts and music will go first, they’ve always harboured the freethinkers. Then the playgrounds and parks. Soon after, we’ll lose education. Not in one chunk but in morsels that go unnoticed initially. They’ll come for the hospitals, too. Once those cuts are too deep to heal, they’ll go after clean air and drinking water.

  “Facts will become flexible. Words will be put on a hit list. You can’t think things if you can’t describe them. They’ll target your work. Got a job? Can’t take holidays. Someone else will do the job if you’re not willing. This will all be sold to you as a necessary sacrifice for the greater good, that our enemy is giving up more. And the enemy will be everywhere — around every corner, behind every door, headline and transaction. The enemy will be everyone — the old, the new, the poor, the rich, the fat, the thin, the red, the blue, the men and women.