Mare Ultima

by Alex Irvine

  The next morning, Paulus saddled the horse and packed into its saddlebags the teeth and tail of the dragon, the scales, the heart, and the eyes. His sword and shield were broken, his armor shredded, his spear taken to hunt seals, the great sword ruined by a winter under snow. He had a thousand miles to cover with a knife and the sling, and a good horse. Mikal would be glad to see it, but not at all glad to see Paulus.

  Perhaps the queen would be glad to see him. Perhaps.

  Joy came out from the house with jerky and a fish. “I caught it this morning before you woke up. Your first meal when you ride away from the ocean should always be a fish,” she said. Paulus thought he understood. He swung up onto the horse and did not look back as he rode south, up the hill track toward the mountains.

  IV: RETURN

  As Paulus came down the river toward The Fells, he had murder on his mind. Not a fair combat. Not the inevitable culmination of a long-simmering dispute. Murder. Somewhere in the tundra of the Mare Ultima, over a long winter of blood and fever and stillborn love, he had found it in himself to be a murderer. He had always believed that murderers were created from either a passion or a flaw of the soul. Now he understood that murderers could be the creatures of thought and planning and rationality too cold to forgive. He had left more than a broken sword and an obstinate woman along the shores of the Mare Ultima.

  Few men had killed a dragon. Fewer still had been ridden by spirits while doing it. Paulus had become one of those men about whom songs could be sung. He tried not to wonder what all of it would mean once he had passed through the city gates and the story began to spread. The Fells looked as he remembered it: grey and jumbled along the inlets of the Black River, rising to the Keep that had looked over the estuary for five hundred years and more. He wondered about his brother Piero, who was not well, and he reminded himself that one of the first things he had to do was kill the seneschal who plotted against the queen. Everything in The Fells seemed like a story from the Book, heard so many times that he had come to believe it happened to him. Once there was a man who killed a dragon… He touched two fingers to his throat.

  Journey there is, and there is Return

  And no man may know

  Whether the home he leaves will greet him again

  What way the wind will blow.

  This was a creed a man could live by, particularly a man with a limited reservoir of piety. Journey and return. The soldier knew this, as did anyone who ever wondered whether the touch of head to pillow would be the last thing felt in this world. Paulus was grateful for the Book. It was all he had of his mother, and all he had of religion, and in both cases it was enough.

  The first thing he did was return Mikal’s horse. Andrew the hostler looked up from restitching tack when Paulus dismounted at the stable gate. “You came back,” he observed. “Get your dragon?”

  “I did,” Paulus said. “What did Mikal say about the horse?”

  “Said he’d kill you, is all. Nothing to worry about.”

  “Good enough,” Paulus said. He handed Andrew the horse’s reins. Andrew clapped him on the shoulder and said, “Bring a bottle by later. Tell us a story.”

  “I’ve got some,” Paulus said. Walking across the courtyard toward the guard post at the Great Door of the Keep, he thought that he might have more soon. Would he have the queen’s gratitude? The king’s? Piero would have been polishing his insults all winter. And Mario Tremano had no doubt spent the cold months refining his plans. This is not the place I left, Paulus thought suddenly and forcefully. He no longer knew where he stood. His old soldier’s instincts prickled on the back of his neck and made his right hand jumpy.

  First, then, to do what could be done easily, which was see Mikal about the horse. He reported to the guard post as if he had been away for an hour instead of nearly a year. Mikal was writing something. “We drown horse thieves around here,” he said without looking up.

  “By the time you’ve retired from the guard,” Paulus said, “you’ll be telling everyone you lent me the horse and it bit the dragon to death while I pissed myself.”

  “He goes to the Mare Ultima and comes back a jester like his brother,” Mikal said to the air. Then he looked Paulus in the eye and added, “Speaking of your brother, he died a month ago.”

  They stayed like that, gazes locked, until Paulus knew there would be either blinking or killing. Because he would not kill Mikal, he blinked. “A month ago,” he said.

  “The day before the death of the king himself,” Mikal said. “The queen is still in mourning. Your guess as to which of them she mourns more.”

  So this was how it was to live in The Fells now, Paulus thought. He left the guard post and went to keep his long-delayed appointment with the queen.

  She received him in her chambers and called for wine and food. Paulus ate and drank out of politeness, feeling her gaze on him and numbering in his mind the differences she would see from the Paulus who had ridded out of The Fells nearly a year before. “We are pleased that you survived,” she said after some time.

  Paulus loosened the drawstring of the saddlebags he was carrying like a satchel. “I have brought the king prizes,” he said. The correctness was excruciating. Accustomed to keeping his peace because he had nothing to say, Paulus grew frustrated when silence was enforced by custom and fear of transgression. He wanted to ask about his brother, but knew he would have to wait for the queen to broach the subject.

  “You have not heard?” the queen said. “Our sovereign has passed. I rule in his stead, the Widow Queen of The Fells.”

  “I am sorry,” Paulus said. “I had not heard.” Nothing was to be gained by telling her the truth. “If I may serve, I hope you will tell me how.”

  “When a man with a sword asks me that, I begin to think I should be afraid of something that I have not yet recognized as a threat. Is that the case, Paulus?” The queen looked at him directly. Her tone was arch but there was no hint of jest in her gaze. Paulus understood: she feared being overheard.

  He opened the saddlebag. “Merely the pledge of the devoted soldier, Majesty,” he said. “I hope these tokens will demonstrate that devotion.”

  On the table next to the wine and the platter, Paulus laid out the dragon’s eyes and heart and teeth. He held up one of the scales to catch the firelight. “Marvelous,” the queen said. “I thank you, Paulus. The king would have been very happy.” She held up one of the teeth, as long as the ceremonial dagger at the seneschal’s belt. “Were you badly wounded?”

  “I was fortunate,” Paulus said. “The people there nursed me.”

  Again she looked him in the eye and again Paulus felt a near-hypnotic compulsion to tell her every secret he’d ever kept. “That is fortunate, for The Fells as well as for you,” said the queen. She held the dragon’s tooth out to him and he took it. “You may keep these as your reward. They would have meant much to the king, but to me they will be mementos of my grief. I have too many of those.”

  She had just made him rich. And if she was correct that their conversation was being overheard, she had also sent a clear signal that Paulus was one of her favorites. With perfect gentleness and delicacy, she had entrapped him in court intrigue. Willingly Paulus entered the trap. “Your generosity humbles me, Majesty,” he said. “I hope to repay it.”

  “No doubt you shall, Paulus,” the queen said. She opened the door and he walked into the corridors of the Keep a marked man, and a man with a mission. He wondered if he would have time to mourn his brother properly before the tensions of succession boiled over into killing.

  When he returned to the guard post, Mikal received him as if their previous conversation had never happened. “You’ll be on garrison duty until we figure out what to do with a dragon-killing hero,” Mikal said. “Enjoy the rest.” Paulus went to the garrison and found an empty bunk. He wanted to sleep but first he had to do something with the dragon trophies. They would be gone the minute he turned his back on them, or closed his eyes, in the garrison. Leaving his
traveling gear on the bunk, he went back down to the stables, stopping along the way to wangle a bottle of wine from the kitchen steward.

  “That didn’t take long,” Andrew observed when Paulus came into his workshop.

  “Important things don’t need may words,” Paulus said. He uncorked the bottle and offered it to Andrew, who drank and handed it back. When they’d passed it twice more, Paulus asked, “What happened to my brother?”

  “He died,” Andrew said.

  “He was a young man,” Paulus said.

  Andrew nodded. “That he was. Sometimes young men die.”

  Behind Andrew’s reticence Paulus sensed something else. A story that could not be told, or a lie that Andrew could not bring himself to tell. “Was he sick?” Paulus asked.

  “He was himself,” Andrew said. “Spitting out his jokes until the day the king died. Then he was silent for a day, and then the next morning he was dead too.”

  “Andrew,” Paulus said. “How many other young men who were friends to the queen died after the king?”

  Andrew drank, his eyes hooded and focused on something in the shadowed corners of his workshop. He looked as if he might speak but drank again instead. Finally he said, “That tomb, in the desert. How many men were buried with that king?” And would say no more.

  Paulus didn’t need to hear any more. He sat with Andrew, watching the wine disappear, taking a sip every so often but mostly just listening to Andrew talk. When the talking slowed, Paulus sat and waited. Andrew began to snore. Paulus left him there and went back to the barracks. He had stowed the dragon trophies in Andrew’s workshop where they would be safe.

  For two weeks he settled into the routines of the Keep, or tried to. Everything seemed to have changed invisibly while he was gone. He was aware of changes but not of what they were. Almost every night he woke from poorly remembered dreams and came down to Andrew’s workshop. The hostler slept little and they were glad of each other’s company. Paulus kept the conversation away from his brother and the queen. Soon enough he would have to deal with both, but first he let the road dust fall from his boots and the weariness of the journey abate.

  On the fifteenth day after his return, when Paulus awoke in the night, he stayed with Andrew only long enough to recover the bag of trophies and toast the pregnancy of Andrew’s eldest daughter. Leaving the stables, Paulus walked around to the kitchen doors at the rear of the Keep. They were barred at this hour. “Guard,” he said, and knocked. A scullion, eyes puffy with sleep and onions, drew back the bar and Paulus entered. It was after midnight. The Keep’s bakers were punching down their loaves and the kitchens smelled of yeast and coffee. Paulus moved among the bakers to the broad oaken doors that led to the Keep’s great dining hall. They too were barred at this hour of the night. He had another scullion open them and said as he pulled them closed again, “Bar this door behind me. Let no one in.”

  What stories they would tell he did not know, nor whether they would connect him with what he was about to do.

  Being a soldier had taught Paulus how to move silently and how to kill. Both of those skills would be of use. He was much less confident of his ability to silence an innocent without killing; this, too, he was hoping to do. He climbed the stairs that led from the rear of the dining hall up eleven floors to the top of the tower that looked along the Ridge of the Keep and down into the Jingle. At the eighth floor he left the stairwell and followed a narrow corridor that led to a catwalk ringing the inside of a part of the tower that had burned centuries ago and never been rebuilt—although the catwalk testified to a project begun and never completed. He came to a window and looked across the hundred yards of space between the tower and the central complex, the Old Keep. There, a floor below, a light burned in the chamber of Mario Tremano.

  Paulus went back down to the second floor and emerged onto the roof of the kitchen. The smell of yeast surrounded him again, carried through the dozen chimneys that reached above Paulus’ head. He made his way along the edge of the roof until he came to the wall of the Old Keep. There he ate a piece of the dragon’s heart. It was bitter and tough, with a pungency that brought tears to his eyes, and as he swallowed it Paulus felt a bloom of strength in his limbs. The silent, darkened courtyards snapped into focus and the small noises of the night came clearly to his ears. He wedged his fingers into the gaps between the ancient stones of the keep and began to climb.

  When he swung over the sill of Mario Tremano’s open window, Paulus was surprised to see the seneschal seated by his hearth sipping what smelled like spiced wine. “It’s not like you to skulk,” Tremano said. “Have you turned assassin?”

  Paulus stood at the window. “What happened to my brother?” he asked.

  “You might have asked me that at any time. Why now?” Tremano drank off the rest of the wine. “My assessment of the situation is that you’re not at all interested in the answer because you’ve already decided on my guilt. So, shall I confess? Very well. Your brother was a chaotic addition to a court that needs above all else stability. And he was sick. I did not kill him, but neither did I make sure that the physicians did everything in their power to save him. Now. What do you intend?”

  “You have the logic backwards,” Paulus said. “My brother died before the king.”

  “A man in my position does not react. He plans.” Mario Tremano stood and approached Paulus. “I repeat: What do you intend?”

  “I will serve my queen,” Paulus said.

  The seneschal shook his head and looked over Paulus’ shoulder out the window. “This is not the court you left, Paulus. It would be well for you to consider that.”

  Paulus had come to the seneschal’s chambers intending murder. He had spent much of his journey down from the Mare Ultima contemplating murder. Now, when the time for the deed was at hand, he had no stomach for it. The effects of the dragon’s heart were already fading. He felt slow and thick. Brushing past Tremano, he walked toward the chamber door. The seneschal, ever courteous, accompanied him.

  As Paulus put his hand on the doorknob, wrought in the shape of a dragon, he felt something drag across the underside of his jaw. He twisted away and felt the blade of a knife open the skin behind his ear. Mario Tremano, astonished, found his voice when Paulus drew his sword. “Guard!” he cried. Paulus split his skull and turned to face the guard who burst in. His name was Livio. He and Paulus had served together on a half-dozen campaigns.

  Paulus pointed at the cut and the blood running down the back of his neck. “You see what happened, Livio,” he said.

  “I’m not sure what I see,” Livio said. “But Mikal will need to see it as well.”

  “Don’t,” Paulus said. There were voices in the hall, footsteps on the stairs; Mario Tremano’s shout had roused this part of the Keep.

  “You can’t kill the seneschal and walk away, Paulus,” Livio said. His sword point lowered.

  “No,” Paulus said. “I doubt I can.” Then he punched Livio in the head with his sword hand. Livio reeled and Paulus threw him to the floor. He ran out of the seneschal’s chamber, deflected a surprised sword thrust from a guardsman coming down the corridor, and kept running until he came to the gates of the Keep. “An errand from the queen,” he panted at the gatekeeper. Behind him, the outcry was growing. “Now!” Paulus demanded. “I must pass.”

  The gatekeeper hesitated.

  “The queen commands it!” Paulus said.

  The gatekeeper raised the bar and Paulus shoved through. In the courtyard voices were crying murder and shouting his name. He ran again, through the mazy streets of The Fells, tearing off his guard tunic along the way and arriving in Nightside Jingle winded, desperate, and certain that he would never pass alive through the gates of the Keep again. Nightside Jingle was the midnight twin of the market, a bazaar whose staple commodities were sex and killing. It was a good place to hide.

  Hiding turned into living somehow. No parties from the Keep came to hunt him down, and Paulus assumed that the queen’s last favor to
him was this unspoken amnesty. He hired out his sword when he could, and when he could not, he sold off bits of the dragon: a scale here, a tooth there.

  It was in one of those hungry periods, a year after he had killed Mario Tremano, that Paulus first met the men of the Agate Tower.

  V: THE AGATE TOWER

  It speared up into the sky from a ridge southwest of the Keep, twice as tall as any other building in The Fells. No one knew by what means it had been erected, or whether it had always been a house of wizards. What went into the Agate Tower rarely came out unless it had been transformed first. That was true of its apprentices, certainly, but less often of certain prominent citizens who went to the wizards looking for something that the brokers down by the river could not sell them, some magic more powerful than could be cobbled together from the bartered essences of fishmongers and orphans. The wizards who lived within took on apprentices rarely, giving no reasons for their choices. They worked magic for money, but also sometimes—as they termed it—”for Law,” which meant acts of magic performed to restore imbalances created by brokered magics. By and large the wizards were monkish, living out their lives within the walls of the Tower unless drawn out into The Fells or the wider world on some errand for guild or sovereign. No one trusted wizards.

  Paulus, hating magic, avoided the Agate Tower and the stretch of winding, mossy streets that surrounded it. He kept to the other end of town, the Jingle and the Nightside and the downriver districts, unless work brought him upstream to the richer areas. But even for a merchant’s money, Paulus wouldn’t go to the Agate Tower. Magic, as far as he could see, had never done a good thing for him in his life. It gave short-term relief from long-term problems.