by T. O. Munro
Her cousin looked up sharply. “The boy? Still the boy?”
Hepdida’s cheeks flushed with colour. “If he happens to be out there, then I am sure he’ll walk a while with me. There is no harm in that.” Niarmit arched a doubtful eyebrow drawing an exasperated exclamation from her cousin. “Honestly, Niarmit. There’s five thousand soldiers camped within these walls. I am sure that’s more than enough to make sure Jay behaves himself as a gentlemen should.”
Niarmit frowned, “but what about you. Who will make sure you behave, Hepdida?”
The princess stood hands on her hips in a pose of furious indignation. The first syllables of outraged honour were already past her lips before she realised that her cousin was smiling, smiling and laughing. “Your face,” she said. “It is a picture.”
The bubble of Hepdida’s anger was abruptly punctured. “Then I can go?”
Niarmit waved her away. “Go, a half hour no more and no straying into stables or smithies, just a walk on the battlements.”
“Just a walk on the battlements,” Hepdida echoed before skipping to the door. She hesitated there, turning back a word of thanks on her lips, but Niarmit was already lost in rapt contemplation of the Helm in her lap.
***
Haselrig looked down on the twin swords nestled in their wooden case and sighed. He had won back some favour with the master. His answers to the Dark Lord’s questions had given some slight satisfaction. It was not rehabilitation exactly, but Maelgrum had afforded him the slightest inclination of his head, the merest flicker of his glowing red eye sockets. A sign that he had taken a step back from the precipice of ‘useless waste of space’ and maybe lost the epithet of annoying too.
There had been something else in the master’s demeanour too. Maelgrum habitually met triumph and disaster with the same uncompromising force of will. The celebration of success or the retribution for failure were untainted by any shred of self-doubt in the Dark Lord. But in the castellan’s chamber the undead wizard had radiated a cold uncertainty, the air frozen not so much with his displeasure as with his dissatisfaction.
Haselrig closed the lid and shook his head. He had supplied one piece of a puzzle, a fragment of useful knowledge, but he did not know what other pieces Maelgrum might have brought or what picture he might assemble from them. When he had returned to the chamber there was nothing different to be seen. The master was gone and Quintala was staring out of one of the arrow alcoves. All was as it had been. There was just the lingering deeper chill in the air, augmenting the unwavering cold laid on to preserve the medusa’s corpse beneath its shroud.
Haselrig crossed to his work bench. He had elevated himself a notch or so in the master’s esteem, and what long term surety had that bought him? He still lived, a piece of flotsam swept along by a tide of evil. However, the best hope that remained was still simply that he might delay the moment when he sank without trace and in the meantime minimise the discomfort until that moment came.
He took a weary seat. Looking back was both difficult and futile. The decisions of the past had shaped his present self in a thousand different and irreversible ways. To ponder the might-have-beens and the what-ifs was merely an exercise in wishing his present self were dead and that a different man had lived a different life. Once each choice had been made the fast flowing waters of cause and effect had quickly dragged him from any point or thought of going back and unpicking what he had done. But still, he scratched at the past until it made his memories bleed.
An abrupt hammering at the door startled him out of the morbid reverie. Furious clash of fist on wood, Odestus screaming, “Haselrig!”
The ex-antiquary hastened up the short flight of steps and unbarred the door with little thought other than to calm and quieten the voluble wizard before his cries should attract attention. In the captured fortress of Listcairn it was safest to assume that any attention was unwanted and unhelpful.
Odestus tumbled through the door. The few hours of separation since their last discussion had wrought an unhealthy transformation in the wizard. His bald head was pink and peeling with sunburn, his clothes dusty with ochre sand, his nose an angry red. The crows’ feet in the corners of his eyes were white lines against a livid skin.
“What has happened to you, Governor?” Haselrig exclaimed.
Odestus pushed the door shut with one hand and grabbed Haselrig by the throat with the other. “Where is she? What have you done with her? What has He done with her?”
Haselrig grabbed at the wizard’s wrist. Odestus’s grip was strong and his eyes wild. The man’s sanity must have fled. It took Haselrig both hands to prize the wizard’s fingers clear enough to draw breath to speak. “He has done nothing, I told you.”
It had been a most honest assurance by Haselrig that the Lady Dema was to be undisturbed. It was founded not so much on his own much mortgaged honour, as the master’s clear and certain will. Maelgrum’s own instructions to the ex-antiquary and the half-elf, had been that whatever happened the body was to remain where it lay. “She is still there,” he gasped past the wizard’s grasping fingers.
“She is not. He has taken her!”
“I assure you, the Lady Dema lies still beneath her shroud. Maelgrum has gone and she is there.”
“Not Dema.” Odestus choked his own words off even as he spoke them then, squeezing a little tighter on Haselrig’s throat, “Where is Galen?”
Haselrig gave a slight sideways jerk of his chin, the closest he could come to a shake of his head in the grip of the sunburnt madman. “I don’t know. I’ve not seen him.”
“What words has he had with Maelgrum?”
“How should I know,” Haselrig squeaked. “Our communions with the Dark Lord are ever a private matter and Galen has barely spared me more than dozen words since I got here.”
“You lie.” Odestus squeezed a little tighter still. Haselrig’s breath came in anguished gasps. A corner of his mind laughed at the irony of the moment. Of all the dangerous people by whose hands he could have met his end these past seventeen years, of Xander, or Dema, or Quintala, or Rondol, or even Maelgrum himself, he would never have thought it was the little wizard would be the one that throttled the life from him.
Suddenly the pressure vanished and Haselrig fell gasping and wheezing to his knees. Odestus loured above him podgy red fingers tangled together, working over and over themselves in tightly wound anguish.
Haselrig looked up at him, massaging his bruised throat, not daring to think what bruises might yet come. “What has come over you, Governor?”
Odestus shook away the question, “forget it.”
“Forget what?” The half-elf’s lilting voice preceded her as she pushed the door open and stepped onto the narrow landing. She took in the scene, Haselrig still spluttering, Odestus glowing with heat and glowering from some undischarged fury.
“A disagreement, Lady Quintala.” Odestus insisted. “That is all.”
The half-elf arched a silver eyebrow in disbelief.
“The governor was concerned over the Lady Dema’s remains.” Haselrig volunteered. “And also the whereabouts of Galen.”
“Indeed, and why would he come to you for the answer to either question?”
“It is nothing,” Odestus insisted, pulling a hand down over his reddened face. “Please excuse me, I must have been mistaken.”
He shuffled out past the half-elf while Haselrig pulled himself upright. Quintala shook her head. “Really, Haselrig, your knack for making enemies knows no limits. With a skill like that I would not dare send you out as a shepherd for fear your own flock would maul you to death.”
Haselrig stretched his neck and gave a hoarse cough. Quintala leant him a companionable arm and lead him down into the chamber to a seat at his table. Haselrig sat twisting his head left and right, testing the strained sinews. Quintala bustled about finding a flagon of liquor and pouring out a generous measure. “Here, try this,” she said thrusting the cup at him. “It might soothe your neck from the insi
de.”
He gulped it down, fire gliding down his throat.
“Now tell me, what was that really about?” She pulled the black medallion from around her neck, unhooking it from the chain and spinning it back and forth between her long elegant fingers.
Haselrig shook his head. “I don’t know. He just went mad. He is obsessive about the lady’s body. He said that she wasn’t there, that the master had taken her.”
“Well she indubitably is there, secure beneath her shroud. Not that the little wizard would know either way. The master has been most insistent that Odestus should be barred from the castellan’s chambers.”
Haselrig stared at Quintala, scanning her laughter filled eyes. Odestus’s concern seemed real. What purpose could be served by a cold corpse kept in a secure tower? “And what does the master want with the lady?” He asked the question anyway, though he doubted he could trust the half-elf to answer straight.
Quintala shrugged and poured him another draught of liquid fire. “Who knows the workings of Maelgrum’s mind? Suffice to say you’ve seen her for yourself, give the little wizard the reassurance he craves.”
Haselrig took another swallow. “He asked after Galen too, wanted to know where he was. Have you seen him?”
“Not for a couple of days,” Quintala admitted.
“Where has he gone?”
The half-elf held up two fingers to count off a simple pair of choices. “Either he has strayed somewhere on his own account, or he is on some secret work at the master’s behest. Either way, it is not a concern of mine.” She spun the medallion on the table, it balanced on its edge spinning so fast it appeared to be a black globe sucking the light from the room.
Haselrig found his gaze drawn by the flickering darkness. Quintala’s tone was light, as she spoke, but her eyes were hard, looking at him over the whirling disc. “I worry about our small wizardly friend,” she said. “The nightly communions with Maelgrum are a strain that could warp a spirit of steel, Odestus’s will is made of softer and more precious stuff.”
The medallion was slowing, tipping sideways as it lost the stability of constant movement, switching from an upright spin to a sideways rocking around its own rim, a motion that became flatter, faster and more desperate with each successive gyration. “We are all of us clinging to our sanity in orbit around the Dark Lord,” Quintala said as the medallion settled lower and more noisily. “For some the perturbations grow ever more eccentric, the struggle against the slide into madness ever more inevitable.” The rattle of the falling medallion was rising in pitch. “I think the little wizard may be reaching that point.”
She snatched at the medallion in the last instant before it fell flat and silent on the table. “We will have to watch our friend Odestus most closely.” She smiled. “Or rather you will. Another task well suited to your station.”
“I am to spy on Odestus?” Haselrig massaged his bruised neck, feeling the ache of swollen tissue.
Quintala shrugged. “Be his companion, Haselrig. He has need of company. I am sure you will find some liquor that you both can enjoy.”
***
“Where in the name of the Goddess have you been?” Thren’s eastern twang grew broader when he was angry, the sounds merging and sliding in a way that had Niarmit straining her ears to decipher his meaning.
It was an uncharacteristic show of rage from the most mild mannered of monarchs amongst her royal forbears. He stood before the gilded throne, hands on hips scolding the queen as though she were a child. “We thought you were dead. I thought you were dead.”
“I’m sorry,” Niarmit mumbled.
“We soon realised you weren’t dead, your Majesty,” Santos squirmed, trying to abase himself low enough to ensure he ranked beneath the penitent queen. “When your sleeping body did not appear in the chamber of arrival, we knew you couldn’t have perished in the battle with the zombies. We had less than a day of doubt.”
Thren snorted. “A day, you’ve been gone a week. We might have worked out that you weren’t dead, but where were you? Captured, injured, dying, we didn’t know. None of us knew.”
He swept his arm round the chamber of the Helm at the half dozen kings and queens who had been startled by Niarmit’s sudden re-appearance. “We’ve been keeping watch, keeping the Kinslayer at bay against the chance of your return. Not knowing when or if we’d see you again.”
“The girl is back, Thren,” Lady Mitalda said. “And you are upsetting her.”
Niarmit lifted the Helm to wipe at her eyes, smearing away the tell-tale trails across her cheeks which Mitalda had spotted. Thren paused in his tirade, running a hand over his coal black hair.
“I’m sorry,” Niarmit said. “I wasn’t thinking. I just had a moment of doubt.”
“Bloody long moment,” one of the Bulvelds growled.
Thren shook his head again, musing aloud. “I thought you were dead, I really feared you’d died. The last we saw was the ground coming up before your face, knowing that something somehow had struck you.”
Niarmit mumbled a further apology. “It’s just, the Helm, it betrayed me. It left me vulnerable. I thought maybe the Goddess did not want me to use it. It is a thing of evil, its existence a blasphemy.” A few of the monarchs in the second row harrumphed their displeasure at this description of their home. “I thought I had trusted to it too much, forsaken the Goddess’s wishes.”
“The Goddess wants Maelgrum defeated, child,” Mitalda said. “She welcomed my Grandfather with open arms to achieve that end a millennium ago. Let us not forget that, much as I admire his memory, he was a murdering enslaving bastard servant of Maelgrum before he became the Dark Lord’s Vanquisher.”
“By the Goddess, with endorsements like that I’m glad you’re not my Grand-daughter,” Thren said.
“No,” Mitalda admitted. “You got the little prick teaser who kept half the princes of the Eastern Lands dancing on the tips of her fingers, but that’s not the point.” She wagged a finger at Niarmit. “The point is the Goddess understands that we have to make dark choices if we are to overcome evil enemies. She will not condemn you for using whatever weapon you have to hand, child, including us and this … this place.”
“I’m sorry, I should have come sooner,” Niarmit pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes. Where was all this Goddess-damned water coming from. She wiped her nose. “I’m sorry I worried you so, I didn’t realise, I didn’t think.”
“Dry your eyes, child,” Mitalda commanded. “There is work to be done.”
Niarmit shook her head, what was wrong with her. She couldn’t stop crying. Thren’s hands were on hers, lifting her up, pulling her off the throne. “Work can wait,” he said more gently than before. “She is here now and it is time she saw the gardens.”
“What about the Helm, I can’t leave it. What if Chirard appears?”
Thren the Seventh looked around the room, “we have three Threns, two Bulvelds and the Lady Mitalda all quite eager to be at Chirard if he should be so unwise as to reappear. I think the Helm is safe in their collective protection.”
He led her through a side passage and down a stairway into the garden. It was the place where she had first arrived in the Domain of The Helm, at the moment of her self-coronation in the orc infested halls of fallen Morwencairn. Thren tucked her arm in the crook of his and patted her hand.
“It’s lovely,” she said, appreciating for the first time the delicate blooms and subtle shades of a garden that would have been a credit to Rugan’s palace at Laviserve.
“Santos is a keen gardener and he has had plenty of time to hone his craft, and reap the advantages that the Helm provides.” Thren breathed into his other hand and a butterfly appeared, its wings marked with a pair of dark discs within azure circles. The creature flew away, its fluttering wings opening and closing like eyes as it hovered over the lush grass.
“How long has Santos been here?” Niarmit asked, blinking away incessant tears.
“Since before my time, befo
re anyone’s time. He looks after us curmudgeonly monarchs.” Thren stopped and took her hands in his. “But who is looking after you, my dear.”
“What?” she blinked up at him. “No-one, I don’t need looking after.”
He stroked a strand of hair away from her face. “I knew a woman like you once, a long time ago. She was the bravest woman I knew. She stood against Chirard, like you did. Without her, he would never have been defeated.”
“Was she?” Niarmit hesitated. “Was she your wife?”
He smiled and shook his head. “No, my cousin, the Lady Yalents. I wish you could have met her, you are so much alike.”
“I do my duty; that is all I can do.”
“And who looks after you while you do that?”
“I don’t need looking after.”
“Of course not, my dear.” He patted her hand and led her along another path, deeper into the garden beneath over hanging branches.
A sudden memory of Kimbolt’s face struck her with such force that she stopped walking, the hurt look in his eyes at their last parting.
“What is it, my dear?”
She batted away the memory. A question hurried from her mouth. “Chirard killed your family didn’t he?”
A wince of pain creased Thren’s expression, but he nodded nonetheless.
“What would you have done to have kept them safe?”
Thren shrugged. “Anything. Who wouldn’t do anything for those he or she loved?”
“Even if it meant never seeing them again? If you could have had them at your side but in danger, or have sent them away to safety, despatched them beyond Chirard’s reach. Would you have chosen safety?”
He frowned. “That’s the decision my parents made for me. They sent me to the Eastern Lands, to be safe, to be beyond Chirard’s grasp. I never saw them again, they probably knew they wouldn’t see me.”
“And did they tell you? Did they tell you why they were doing it?”
Thren shrugged. “There wasn’t time. An old family retainer came to take me away, it was too dangerous for me to see my parents to say our goodbyes.”
