by T. O. Munro
“Lo,” Haselrig called out as the shroud of trees parted and the forest of Kelsrik yielded them a first glimpse of their destination. “We can be in the castle by midday, if we hurry.”
“Why hurry?” Quintala drawled. “Why not admire the view?” Putting action to the word, or rather inaction, she drew her horse to a halt, turning its head so she could survey her new command.
The outlander driving the wagon hauled on the brake with dull resignation. Another rest stop was as galling to him as to the others in the party but he, like Haselrig, knew better than to venture any opinion aloud. The only thing that had retained its swiftness was Quintala’s temper; sharp words and a blow were sure to be the reward for any doubts cast on the half-elf’s decisions.
Sitting beside the driver, Haselrig followed the half-elf’s gaze towards Listcairn. The teardrop shaped town nestled on the flank of the low sloping hill, its broader south-eastern end straddling the Eastway. The castle squatted at the high point of the hill on the north-western tip of the town. Shaped by some long ago cataclysm, the mound afforded steep sides on three edges of the castle and yet a gentle incline to the fourth on which the walled town could comfortably rest in the shadow of the castle’s protection.
The low walls and towers of the town enclosed the settlement in an illusion of protection. The castle itself was set in the perimeter of the town like the gemstone in a ring and where the town walls butted up against the castle, the contrast was brutal. The great round towers of the fortress stood like giant teeth bedded in the jawbone of the hilltop so huge that there was barely a tower’s width of space for the castle’s curtain wall to run between each pair. The castle’s walls were at least twice the height of the town’s and, as Haselrig recalled, nearly three times as thick.
The eight towers of the castle were so arranged as to divide the fortress into two connected parts; a near perfect square to the north, conjoined with an irregular hexagon to the south. The space enclosed by the northern square comprised the castle’s keep, from which the leaded roofs of the government apartments glinted in the late morning sunlight. The southern hexagon formed the outer bailey sharing two of its towers with the square keep.
The towers all rose a full storey above the height of the curtain wall to emphasise the castle’s brooding menace. One tower, the castellan’s tower, at the juncture of keep and bailey, had a slender second tower sprouting from its inner edge. This rose higher still a lone finger of stone pointing at the sky. It was the castle’s beacon tower where, a half year earlier, the signal fire would have been lit as the news of the fall of Sturmcairn had spread across the Salved Kingdom.
“How did she take it?” Haselrig mused aloud.
“Who?” Quintala snapped.
Oblivious to the warning in the half-elf’s tone, Haselrig went on. “Dema, how did she take a fortress such as that with just five hundred?”
“A fortunate subterfuge,” Quintala replied her horse stamping restless with the half-elf’s irritation. “The medusa got lucky, an idiot castellan fell for her plan. It was I who met Constable Kircadden, I showed him Eadran’s body. I planted fear and worry in his tiny mind. I filled his imagination with unknown terrors; Dema reaped the harvest I had sowed, that is all.” She glared at Haselrig, daring him to say any different, but the ex-priest knew better than to challenge her opinion.
“Of course, Quintala.” His own voice was flat, studiously unadorned with artifice or any hint of sarcasm.
“Come then, let us claim my new command from that superannuated wizard and the dandified necromancer.”
She swung her horse back on the road. “Lady Quintala,” the wagon driver dared to speak. “Castle gate or town gate?”
The half-elf frowned looking towards the distant fortress. A path rose up winding its way along the hillside outside the town wall to a gate directly into the castle bailey. A second gate in the next section of the castle’s curtain wall opened into the town and could be accessed only by following the Eastway into the body of the town and taking Bulveld Street up towards the castle.
“Town gate,” Quintala said firmly. “Let the people see who they answer to now.”
***
Odestus sat by Dema’s body as he had sat countless hours before. “It was easier this time,” he said. “Much easier. It seems I don’t even have to kill the chameleon provided I find the right one. And I have. Doesn’t that surprise you? It should?”
Dema made no answer. She never did. She was dead after all. But then, there was no-one else Odestus could talk to, not about this. Vesten was not to be trusted with any more information than Galen might in extremis prize from his lips, and this was information the necromancer would prize above all else.
“I wish you could have met her,” Odestus went on filling the unanswered silence. “I wish you could have known about her. I nearly told you a dozen times. I don’t know if it would have made any difference. You were so… so ungoverned at the end.” He reached out to pat the corpse. Its cool skin was unbroken by any decay, the little wizard’s magic maintaining the cold temperature that elsewhere had fled with winter. “She’s not a monster.” He frowned. “She tries hard not to be a monster, and I can help her, I think I can help her. It’s nearly ready.”
He sighed and ran a hand across his balding scalp. “She wants to know about you, she asks all the time. She’s not so curious about him, but I’ve told her that you’re both dead. She knows that.” He shook his head. “What am I to tell her about you, Dema, what can I say?”
He wiped impatiently at his eyes. “You were at once the most wonderful and the most terrible person I ever knew. I made you, I cursed you, and you repaid me by saving my life so many times, but you wouldn’t let me save yours.
“Why Dema, why didn’t you take it?” He looked at her face, entirely human, unmarked save by the scar of Rugan’s sword, carved on her cheek in the battle by the Saeth. “You were beautiful, you were powerful. Why did you wait to be dead before you became human again? You threw away your chance, you threw away my potion. I will not let your daughter make the same mistake. I owe you that much and so much more besides.”
There was a noise outside, shouts on the battlements and in the bailey. Odestus rose from his seat, surprised at the stiffness in his knees, a testament to how long he had sat in one sided communion with the medusa’s corpse.
The castellan’s chamber was a circular cell some twenty feet in diameter. Two deep alcoves cut into the fifteen foot thickness of the walls lead to arrow slits, one overlooking the bailey, the other the forest of Kelsrik. A third alcove bricked in and with its own door, comprised the bed chamber, unused since Dema’s death. This too had an arrow slit opening that looked westwards.
Odestus quickly checked the view from all three vantage points. Whatever had caused the commotion on the battlements someone would come to tell him of it shortly. But long experience had taught the little wizard the benefit of knowing something before he was told; a rumour of omniscience was a valuable myth to cultivate in one’s subordinates. The glimpse of a wagon and a troop of horseman passing through the town’s western gate was enough to confirm what he had suspected, indeed had been expecting for some time.
There was frantic knocking at the door.
“Come in Vesten,” Odestus commanded, slipping into the chair behind the desk and assuming a pose of unhurried scrutiny of some paperwork.
The secretary sidled through the door, puzzlement etched in his features. “How did you know it was me, Governor?”
Odestus ignored the question, no need to share with his secretary how easily his identity could be deduced. No-one else could have been in such a state of panic as to knock like that and yet so bound by servility to knock rather than simply barge in. “I take it she has arrived then, the half-elf that is,” he said.
Vesten’s eyebrows rose a little higher, but this time he did not probe for the source of his master’s intelligence. “The Lady Quintala and her entourage have just ridden into the town. T
hey will be here in a matter of minutes.”
“And I will greet them,” Odestus replied. When Vesten waited expectantly the wizard added for emphasis. “I will greet them then, when they arrive. I see no need to hurry yet.”
Vesten rubbed his hands unhappily one over the other. “She is to command here, Governor and I understand she is an impatient mistress.”
Odestus snorted. “Impatient for the attendance of others, maybe Vesten, but in no great hurry to attend to her own orders. We have been awaiting her for over a week. I’ll not fault myself for a few minutes delay in presenting myself to her, not when that is set against the seven days of tardiness she has already displayed.”
Vesten hopped unhappily from one foot to the other so miserable of countenance that Odestus felt obliged to dismiss him. “Go, Vesten, you may tell the half-elf that I will be down presently. There are a few matters I must attend to first.” He picked up the nearest paper, waving it at the secretary for emphasis hoping Vesten did not notice that it held just an inconsequential inventory of stores in the bakehouse tower.
As soon as the door had closed behind the departing secretary’s back, Odestus dropped the irrelevant list and leant back in his chair. This moment had been coming for some time, it had been foretold in his evening communications with Maelgrum and Odestus faced the prospect of a new direct master with equanimity. He had never met the Lady Quintala, nor even known her as the source of Maelgrum’s uncanny knowledge of the politics and woes of the Salved Kingdom. But he knew of her, the half-elf lady, seneschal for over two centuries. He could not guess what had driven her to this treachery. He could not imagine what dire threat or privation might have forced the privileged half-elf to seek out the service of Maelgrum. A choice of master that had been forced on himself and Dema by the circumstance of their fragile existence in exile.
Still, he thought, he would greet this woman. And then he would seek out refuge and preoccupation in his laboratory at the foot of the tower which Dema had given over for his use. Provided the half-elf did not get in his way or delay his research or demand any arduous service from him he was sure that he and the Lady Quintala would get along just fine.
A whim for elusivity suddenly caught him, and he rose from the desk. No doubt the half-elf would claim these apartments for her own, and this might be his last chance to savour the privileges of the castellan’s tower. The outer door to the chamber led to a simple stone landing. Although the floor was on a level with the battlements, there were no openings from it onto the keep’s curtain walls, just two tightly wound spiral staircases embedded side by side in the thickness of the wall. One wound down to the two floors below, the other wound up into the thin spire of the beacon tower in its perch on the rim of the much broader castellan’s tower.
He directed his steps upwards. After one awkward flight he came level with the opening onto the upper battlements. These ran around the circumference of the top of the castellan’s tower. Two outlander guards stood together staring south, doubtless watching the half-elf’s procession through the town. Odestus frowned. Despite the excitement of the moment, they should have been walking the circular wall, maintaining a vigilant eye on the surrounding countryside. He sighed. Maybe he was going soft, maybe he did need replacing, if simple matters of discipline and duty were so easily cast aside and the soldiers gathered like chattering children at a Goddess day parade.
He continued his ascent within the beacon tower, its interior just wide enough for the staircase. A further two storeys taxed his old legs and aching knees and it was with some difficulty that he pushed the trapdoor back and clambered onto the highest platform in the fortress of Listcairn.
The solitary sentry here had also been drawn by the spectacle unfolding to the south, but he had the good grace to turn and salute at the crash of the door falling against the stone. “Governor Odestus.”
The little wizard nodded at the great crossbow discarded on the stone floor. “Aren’t you supposed to have that to hand at all times.”
The sentry gulped but an edge of defiance still showed through the fabric of his apology. “Forgive me, Governor; those were the Lady Dema’s orders.”
Odestus’s mouth flattened in a grimace of displeasure. “And I have not rescinded them, not any of the lady’s orders.” He looked pointedly at the weapon built large to take advantage of the range that such a height would afford. After an unsatisfactory hesitation, the sentry at last crossed the tower top to pick up the crossbow.
Odestus took up the position that the guard had surrendered, gazing south across the irregular hexagon of the outer bailey towards the town of Listcairn. The Eastway could just be glimpsed at the bottom of the hill running from west to east through the southern edge of the town. There was a commotion of sorts at the junction where the broad reach of Bulveld Street running south from the castle met the Eastway.
Figures on horseback, followed by a wagon, were turning the corner and commencing the procession up to the Castle’s town gate. The travellers had acquired a small group of followers. Or at least as they passed men, women, children and orcs would pause in their work, watching for a few moments following for a few paces, but then returning to the tasks they dared not abandon. So the gaggle of spectators which accompanied the half elf’s party was a transient group that changed it population but did not grow in size.
Odestus rested his hands on the stone embrasure, feeling the wind lifting the stray hairs that still adhered to his polished head. Was this the wind of change, he wondered. He looked down at the courtyard of the bailey nearly eighty feet below. This place had brought his darkest moment in twenty years, the instant when Dema had hurled his hard won hand crafted potion into the air dooming herself and him to this lonely fate. His hands curled into fists, short nails scratching across the stone. Half-elf overlord or not, he would not fail the daughter as he had failed her mother.
***
Kimbolt was lost in thought, lulled by the gentle swaying of the saddle as his horse trotted along the Eastway. He replayed the cold moment of parting. The pain of its brevity had not dimmed in the intervening fortnight. The queen had barely looked at him, and the few glances she had spared him had been so cool, the words so plain. She could have been bidding safe journey to the vaguest of her acquaintances rather than one who had shared both her perils and her bed.
The scene surrendered no more reassurance with each revisit, but still Kimbolt played it through his imagination again and again, picking at the scar in his heart. He did not know how he had lost her love, what crime he had committed beyond saving her with a spear shot at a dragon’s eye. However, lost it he undoubtedly had and not just surrendered her love, but also the opportunity to recover it. This thankless mission to Oostport was so clearly designed to take him far from her side and also to prevent his returning.
There had been more warmth in the parting she had bid to Rugan. The half-elf, once the greatest obstacle to her plans save Maelgrum himself, was now a favoured counsellor, asked to take words of greeting to Giseanne and the Lordling Andros. Though even then there had been a certain austere formality to Niarmit’s words. Their triumphs, the castle’s capture, the dragon’s defeat, Quintala’s humiliation, those victories that should have wreathed her in joyful smiles, might as well never have happened.
Rugan, for all his new found swiftness of action and oaths of fealty to the queen, had little reason to favour the seneschal. He could not have forgotten the accusations of treachery which Kimbolt had directed at the wrong half-elf. But even so, the Prince of Medyrsalve had spared the disconsolate soldier an occasional word of comfort and a look of support on the long ride from the fortress of Mattucairn atop Colhill to the palace of Lavisevre in Medyrsalve. The sympathy from such an anticipated source had all the more potential to trigger a breakdown in Kimbolt’s reserve.
On reflection, he might have thought it possible that the half-elf had simply been softening him up for the imposition he planned to make when they reached Laviserve. Kimbolt s
cowled at the idea and then, as though summoned by an awareness of his thoughts, the woman rode up beside him.
She was riding side saddle, elegantly dressed as ever. She had been persuaded to leave most of her gowns behind; Rugan had said he would send them on when a suitable cart had been found. Kimbolt had hoped that the trauma of being separated from her dresses might have swayed the Lady Maia’s decision; that she might have opted to take the slower route with the baggage. But when that possibility had been put to her, she had drawn herself up to a taller height than he remembered and asserted, “I am my Lord Tybert’s spiritual adviser. I go where he goes, I endure whatever hardships he endures. If he is to return in haste to Oostport then I will travel with him, not with the baggage.”
And so, with a barely concealed grin, Rugan had saddled Kimbolt with both the wastrel Lord Tybert and his shameless concubine. The prince had, in fairness granted Kimbolt a troop of cavalry to dilute the company of the Oostsalve pair. He must have thought the soldiers a small price to pay to rid himself of the extended trespass on his hospitality. A long ago invitation, when the half-elf had thought to gain some political advantage from the presence of the second son of Oostsalve, must have now ranked among Prince Rugan’s poorer decisions. A decision he had seized this opportunity to unmake, though he had at least the decency to give the seneschal an apologetic pat on the back when he had bid them farewell; it had been a more companionable parting than the one the queen had granted Kimbolt.
“You are a hard task master, Seneschal.” Maia’s soft voice caressed the words in an observation flavoured more with admiration than reproach. “This is a fast pace you drive.”
