by T. O. Munro
“How long will the opening last, your reverence?” Niarmit asked. “In case we have to make a hasty return.”
“I don’t know, your Majesty. Usually it is the caster who closes them once they have served their purpose. It will otherwise stay open as long as I leave my crescent nearby. It is the artefact I used to cast the spell; while it remains the spell remains.”
“So for all that time the door in the planes is open,” Kimbolt said quickly.
“Aye, Seneschal. But we still cannot journey in safety more than a handful of times through it.”
Niarmit’s enthusiasm had been fired by the captain’s questions. “But we can see through it and we may even talk through it. We can communicate with our council while still remaining here.”
The bishop shrugged unhappily. “In theory, it is possible, your Majesty. But these openings were never meant to last by those who created and used the spells. I am sure there may be some decay that sets in. I doubt it could last for ever, or maybe it would not stay safe for ever.”
“But be it a few days, weeks, months even. It would all be useful. Think how many heralds have risked their lives journeying across the pale of Silverwood. Here we have a means to stay in instant contact across half the width of the Salved Kingdom.”
“But it relies on my symbol, your Majesty.” The bishop’s protest was almost a wail. “All the time that my crescent must stay here to sustain this portal, I will be barred from gaining the Goddess’s healing grace and sustenance.”
Niarmit gave him a faint smile. “It is a small and temporary sacrifice, your Reverence. Now come, you know this fortress, lead us to the Lady Isobel and Yannuck the boy prince.”
***
Abroath urged his horse forward alongside Elise’s. “He likes his solitude our noble thief.” The prior gave a nod towards Kaylan, walking his horse some way infront of the double column of marching dwarves.
“I do too.”
The prior ignored her laconic reply. “Do you think success will attend our mission, Mistress Elise? Do we have the Goddess’s blessing?”
She looked across at him, arching a sceptical eyebrow as she scanned him from sandaled feet to tonsured head. “Well if you don’t know, father Abroath, then I certainly don’t. The Goddess and I.” She hesitated, “we are estranged.”
“Come now, Mistress Elise. No one is beyond the Goddess’s love. All those who do her work in whatever form and with whatever overt intent still lie within the circle of her grace.”
“You do know I am a sorceress? A human sorceress?”
“That doesn’t mean you’re not a nice person.”
“I cast spells, Prior. I break the law. Prince Rugan put me in a cell for it.”
“Is that why you chose to come with us then, rather than stay at the palace?”
She frowned. “The queen ordered me to accompany you.”
Arbroath’s mouth bent in a grin. “The way I followed the discussion, I would say Her Majesty heard the implicit suggestion in your words and merely reflected your own proposal back at you.”
Elise sniffed and clicked her tongue to move her horse a little faster, closing the gap on the fast paced dwarven infantry. Abroath urged his own horse forward to keep alongside her. “Which brings me back to my original question. Our Kaylan likes his solitude doesn’t he?”
This time Elise followed his gaze to the lean thief on his roan mare, circling on the spot some way down the track, impatient with the pace the dwarves maintained. “He has a lot of thoughts he wants to be alone with,” she said. “As do I.”
“He couldn’t set off sharp enough this morning. Barely waited to let the queen bid him good bye.”
“Perhaps he is eager for the fight, keen to reclaim his lost homeland.”
“Hurrying towards something?” Abroath weighed the thought carefully. “Or running away from something else?”
“We are all running, Prior. Fuck knows there’s plenty enough to run from.”
Abroath was silent for a moment or so before observing, in the same tone he might have commented on the inclement weather, “you have a coarse tongue, Mistress Elise.”
“It’s one of my better qualities.”
“But I forgive you.”
Again her eyebrows rose and she managed to splutter. “That is gracious of you.”
“Provided you tell me true, what chance do you think our mission has of success?”
“Ah, Prior. Well for allies we have ten rival dwarf clans with such speed of action and decision, that it took them a week to decide what order they should march to Laviserve in. For soldiers we will have whatever sweepings of the barrack room floor Rugan and Sir Ambrose can muster to make up the five hundred that the queen has promised Pardig. Against us stands an entire occupied province with, I am sure a lot more fit and eager orcs and nomads than the dwarves let on.” She wagged a finger at Abroath. “Dwarves do not ask for an army, when they only need a batallion. That would not be good business sense.”
She gave a sweeping wave of her hand from the distant Kaylan to the prior at her side before pressing her palm to her chest. “Leading this forlorn hope we have a moody thief, an idealistic prior and a scarred and cranky old hag. I’d rate our chances somewhere below fuck-all.”
Abroath harrumphed his displeasure. “Come now Mistress Elise, you do yourself a disservice. You are not old!”
She smiled at that. The prior was growing on her.
***
It was a bizarre journey through the stone corridors of the great fortress of Karlbad. Periodically courtiers and servants would emerge from side passages and mark the hurrying quartet with no greater challenge than a bow or curtsy, as though there were no mystery at all in the bishop’s precipitous return accompanied by three complete strangers to the land of Nordsalve.
The hallways they passed through grew wider and taller as they approached the castle’s political centre. There they were spotted by a fat man in thick furs before a pair of great oak doors. He hailed the bishop. “Your reverence, I had not heard of your return. We have been expecting your embassy for three weeks now.” He hurried towards them, heavily ringed hands working over each other.
Kimbolt appraised him with a glance. Too young to carry such excess weight, clean shaven jowls wobbling in the half light. His scalp was bare, or it would have been but for an elaborate conceit. Overlong hair had been dragged from virtually the nape of his neck and plastered down in imperfect coverage of a pink expanse of crown, but strips of bald pate still gleamed between the lank fronds of mouse brown hair.
“We are just arrived, Margrave,” Sorenson told him. “May I present Her Majesty, Queen Niarmit and with her Crown Princess Hepdida and Seneschal Kimbolt.”
The man bowed as low as his ill-balanced body would allow. “You are most welcome, I am sure. Though if you could have come when first expected, much evil might have been averted.”
“Your Majesty, this is Chancellor Margrave, my lady’s close advisor.” Sorenson frowned. “He is normally more discrete in his observations.”
“Indeed, your reverence, indeed,” the civil servant wobbled. “But this is a far from normal time. Lady Isobel and her retinue have been but a few days restored to the royal residence and all is still pandemonium.”
“Restored?” Niarmit snapped. “They had been displaced?”
Margrave’s cheeks undulated with his nodding. “Just so, your Majesty, just so. But come, Lady Isobel has need of whatever comfort and succour you can offer.”
He led the way through the double doors into the castle’s receiving room. Twin thrones stood at the far end, both empty. Infront of them paced a short woman, not quite to Niarmit’s shoulder. Long blond hair was braided in a plait down to the small of her back and she was shaking her head as she spun on her heel and suddenly caught sight of the new arrivals.
“Margrave, Sorenson, what news? Have you found him?”
“Who, my lady?” The bishop’s voice was gentle, his manner soothing, as he app
roached the distraught woman hands extended in a slow calming downward beat.
“Yannuck.” She spat the answer as though it must be obvious to all. “My boy, Yannuck. He has taken the boy. Why did it take you so long to return Sorensen?”
Two figures moved forward from the shadow of the thrones, a contrasting pair. Both were of lean warrior build but perhaps two decades apart in age. The younger man wore a thick black beard and a crown of shoulder length hair that must have been the envy of the chancellor. There was a glint from a thick gold ring in his ear and, despite the lady’s distress, his eyes crinkled in amusement.
The older man was grey and bald, a fact he embraced with no shame or subterfuge. His grizzled beard was trim, his expression sombre.
Sorenson greeted them both with warm familiarity, the elder man first. “Johanssen, Pietrsen, we seem to have arrived at a time of some unusual disquiet.”
“You have had no word from us?” the grey bearded Johanssen spoke first. “We sent many heralds.”
“And none came back with replies,” Margrave wailed.
“Why did it take you so long?” Isobel repeated.
“We encountered some unexpected delays, Lady Isobel.” Niarmit’s firm level tone seized the attention of all. “But we came as quickly as we could.” She reached out her hand for the Helm, which Hepdida dumbly passed to her. “Here is the Great Helm of Eadran, my badge of office, my right to rule. I have come in all haste with Seneschal Kimbolt and Princess Hepdida. Now tell me, who are these people and what trouble has befallen here?”
“I am Johanssen, Constable of the infantry,” the older man took it upon himself to make the introductions. “This is Pietrsen, new made Master of Horse.”
“Master of Horse?” Sorenson puzzled. “Then Torsden is..”
“A traitor, a vile murderous traitor,” Isobel interrupted. “He is stripped of all titles and honours. He should hang. He will hang”
“We may have trouble finding a gallows high enough, my lady.” Pietrsen murmured. “My predecessor in this title is an exceptionally tall man.”
“This is no time for cheap humour, Pietrsen,” Johanssen growled at his cavalry counterpart.
“Vaddi is dead,” Isobel exclaimed at Sorenson. “Poor Vaddi, dead.”
“Who is Vaddi?” Hepdida asked. “I thought the Prince’s name was Yannuck.”
“Not the prince,” Sorenson told her. “Vaddi Zoirzi is, or at least was the prince’s tutor, and also Lady Isobel’s personal secretary.”
“Vaddi Zoirzi?” Kimbolt twisted his tongue around the sound. “That’s not a very traditional Nordsalve name.”
“He was from the Eastern Lands,” Isobel gulped. “A kinder gentler man there never was.”
“One person, please,” Niarmit held up her hand for quiet. “Tell this tale from the beginning. Lady Isobel?”
The Lady of the North opened her mouth to speak but then shook her head and beckoned Johanssen to take up the story. The constable frowned at the start of his tale. “We had been expecting you, your Majesty.”
Niarmit waved him on.
“Torsden had been pressing his suit on the Lady Isobel. He was very critical of the way the boy was being brought up.”
“Ziorzi?”
“Torsden and a number of others felt that Vaddi’s influence was too great, that he was too close to the prince and his mother. Torsden claimed he would rescue the royal family from this weak livered corruption from the Eastern Lands.”
“There was no harm in Vaddi,” Isobel sniffed.
“When Torsden heard that your Majesty was coming he decided he had to make his move. He seized Prince Yannuck, from his mother’s side, he and his rabble rousing allies. Zoirzi was there too, he tried to hide behind the queen.” There was in Johanssen’s measured tone the merest hint of disapproval of the secretary’s cowardice.
Isobel heard it. “What did you expect? There were eleven of them, all armed to the teeth, and just him. Of course he tried to hide, and I tried to protect him. Those men were brutes.”
“They made you give him up then, though.”
Isobel nodded. “And they killed him there, right there. Cold blooded murder.” She shivered, wrapping her arms around herself. “They stabbed him again and again and again. In front of me and Yannuck. It took them for ever to kill him.”
“I counted fifty-six wounds on his body,” Margrave helpfully interjected.
“What happened then?” Niarmit prompted after a moment’s gentle silence.
“They held us prisoner here,” Isobel said dully. “They kept me separate from my boy. Until Pietrsen managed to spirit me away.”
The new made Master of Horse gave a modest moue of acknowledgment.
“I shouldn’t have let you. I shouldn’t have let you take me without Yannuck.”
Pietrsen’s smile of self-congratulation evaporated at Isobel’s sharp reproach. “It was hard enough getting you out, my lady. The prince was guarded by Torsden himself.”
“A brave man would have made the attempt,” Johanssen growled.
“And a dead man would have got the Lady Isobel precisely nowhere,” Pietrsen snapped back. “There was only ever one man that bested Torsden in combat and he, may the Goddess gather his soul, died at the Derrach Gorge.”
“Prince Hetwith.” Kimbolt hadn’t realised he had spoken aloud until he felt Isobel’s keen eyes upon him.
“You knew my husband?”
“I… I had heard of him,” Kimbolt concluded hastily. It seemed better than admitting he had stood on some part of her husband’s remains in the bloody aftermath of the medusa’s first and most remarkable victory.
“Everybody knew Hetwith, everyone loved Hetwith,” Sorenson said.
“So Pietrsen got you out, but not the boy,” Niarmit nudged the story tellers along.
“He brought her to me at the border forts along the lower river,” Johanssen resumed the sorry tale. “I’d been there waiting for your arrival, or a herald’s return.” He gave the queen an eyeblink of reproach before moving on. “We gathered the most loyal troops.”
“Which was pretty much all of them,” Pietrsen added.
“And we marched back here to Karlbad.”
As Johanssen tried to stare Pietrsen down, Margrave nipped in with his own contribution. “Torsden had gone too far and he knew it. A lot of his allies just melted away. He knew the end was coming.”
“And he fled,” Johanssen snapped. “He left the day before we got here, with a handful of his most loyal followers.”
“And my boy, he took my boy with him.”
“Where is Torsden now?”
“Nobody knows,” Isobel cried. “Nobody can find him.”
“He is a mountain wolf,” Johanssen said. “He has friends and hideaways all over the mountains and plains of the North. We have parties out looking, but he could be anywhere.”
“My son could be dead.”
“Calm yourself, my lady,” Johanssen insisted. “Torsden was your husband’s greatest friend. That twisted friendship may have driven him to command the murder of poor Zoirzi, but I am sure he will not harm even so much as a hair on the head of Hetwith’s heir.”
“We buried poor Vaddi,” Isobel told Sorenson. “I gave him a good funeral, a service of honour and appreciation. He came from a sunny land. He did not deserve such an end, butchered in the depths of winter.”
Johanssen winced. “A little less honour to the dead tutor might have served our cause a great deal better, my lady,” the constable said. “The grandeur of the funeral has re-awakened those prejudices which Torsden played on. A murdered foreigner is a horrific crime, a foreigner so honoured in death is a feast for scandalmongers. It is hampering the search for your son.”
“How can it?”
“Because, my lady,” Johanssen said grimly. “As I was about to tell you, before the bishop’s arrival, It means I cannot trust the loyalty of half my foot soldiers. The officers will answer to my will, but the common privates and corpor
als are a simple lot, easily swayed by xenophobia, a xenophobia rekindled by the princely interment of a simple foreign tutor. With such a charismatic presence as Torsden, I dare not send them in pursuit of him. Indeed, I fear there are some might mutiny and seek him out themselves even now, thinking to serve him rather than arrest him.”
“So you have two problems.” Kimbolt screwed up his face in contemplation. “You have to seek out Torsden with the stolen prince, and you have to re-secure the loyalty of the infantry garrisons along the lower river.”
Johanssen nodded slowly, a smile of appreciation for Kimbolt’s analysis. “Yes, Seneschal, yes, that is pretty much how it is.”
“Then we had better get to work,” Niarmit said. “Neither sounds like a short task, but both will be sooner done if sooner started.”
***
The barn was just an indistinct darker nucleus within the midnight gloom. Jay shifted in his hiding place, snow crunching beneath his arms as he watched the space he knew held a building, an empty building.
There was a sliver of light, a door opening a crack. The light blinked out then back again, briefly eclipsed by a shape slipping through the opening, and then the light disappeared altogether as the door was pulled closed.
A soft hiss of triumph escaped Jay’s frozen lips, his suspicions vindicated. He levered himself up on elbows and knees and shuffled forward a fraction. Suddenly the blackness went darker, coarse material with an odour of wet potatoes against his cheek. The same sack that had been dropped over his head was used to pull him upright, the hessian twisted tight around his neck. He wriggled, squawking muffled shouts from within his sackcloth shroud. Then something cold and sharp was pressed against his ribs, biting through jacket and shirt to prick the skin beneath. Jay stopped wriggling. More simple physical commands urged him forward, a shove between the shoulder blades a pinch on his elbow. He obeyed.
The crunching snow gave way to gravel. A door creaked. A wave of warmth enveloped him, but could not stop the shivering that seized him. He was pushed to his knees. The bag was whipped off and he blinked in the sudden glare of a dim lantern light.
