The Shadow Throne

PART FOUR

ORLANKO

The grand bishop of the Sworn Church of Vordan was a big, soft man, made bigger by the fantastical crimson robes that hung in complicated folds around him, secured by jeweled clasps and tricks of embroidery. He looked like a flower, Duke Orlanko thought, an enormous, poisonous flower of the sort that grew in southern jungles and smelled of rotten meat. He spoke with a trace of a Murnskai accent, mostly audible in the way he attacked his hard K’s as if he meant to spit.

“The cathedral is full to bursting with my frightened flock,” he said. “They have fled the rioting, and they bring most terrible, terrible stories. Sworn Churches pulled down, gold plate looted, icons used for firewood. Sworn Priests beaten to death and their corpses abused and hung from lampposts. Gently born women taken in the street like dogs, by gangs of a dozen men or more. .”

The grand bishop’s face was as red as his outfit, and he looked as though he were about to faint. The Borelgai ambassador, Ihannes Pulwer-Monsangton, sweating in his heavy furs, started up in his place. “I, too, have heard these stories. And now we hear that the Vendre itself has fallen, with the captain of Armsmen inside? The archdemagogue Danton and his followers have been freed, and bands of his men roam the city at will.”

Orlanko looked around the Cabinet table. Count Torahn looked as though he were in shock, and Rackhil Grieg was staring at Ihannes like a starving man at a side of beef. The chair for State was unoccupied, as always, and in place of the Minister of Justice sat a pudgy man in the green uniform of an Armsman lieutenant, looking very uncomfortable.

It was this last that worried the duke. Where the hell is Vhalnich? It was too much to hope that the man had gotten caught up in the rioting and been himself killed, though the captain who’d been taken prisoner at the Vendre had been one of his creatures. No, he’s out there causing trouble. And Orlanko would need to make his move soon; rumors of the king’s death were already spreading, in spite of all his precautions. There were too many servants in the palace for even the Concordat to keep anything quiet for long.

“Before he, uh, left,” the lieutenant said, “the captain instructed me to make every effort to secure the cathedral and the eastern half of the Island. We also have men in place on all the North Shore bridges.”

“My analysts put the number of rioters at more than twenty thousand,” Orlanko said, not without a hint of contempt. “If they were to storm the bridges, do you really expect your men to stop them?”

“My men will do their best, Your Grace,” the lieutenant said. “Until we receive further instructions from the captain or my lord Mieran.”

“No offense to our boys in green,” Torahn said, “but the Armsmen are clearly inadequate for this crisis. We must summon the regiments.”

Those words hung in the air for a long moment. Orlanko looked around the room-at his fellow Cabinet members, at the two foreigners, and at the small queue of courtiers behind them, waiting to present their grievances. Nearly everyone, he guessed, was thinking the same thing.

It had been nearly a hundred years since royal troops had entered the city, following a tradition upheld through the reign of four kings. The last time, when Farus IV had marched his triumphant legions across the Old Ford, had been the beginning of a civil war and the Great Purge. Every one of the carefully tended family trees in the room had branches that had been pruned during those tumultuous years, great-uncles and cousins who had died on one side or the other, or were simply caught in between. And there were more ancient families that had been extinguished by the vengeful king for their insurrection, including four of the five great ducal lines dating back before the time of Karis.

All but Orlanko’s, who’d chosen the right side. One by one, every face in the room turned to him. The Last Duke cleared his throat.

“Do you think,” he said carefully, “troops could arrive in time?”

Torahn nodded emphatically. “I smelled something in the wind when all this started, so I sent to the camp at Midvale to be ready to march on three hours’ notice. That’s a good forty miles from here, but the post can get there in a day’s ride. There’s a good road all the way. If I put a messenger on a horse within the hour, we can have eight hundred cuirassiers here by tomorrow evening, and six thousand infantry a day or two after that. Three at most, if the damned rain keeps up.”

Ihannes caught Orlanko’s gaze. “Eight hundred heavy horses would go a long way toward assuring His Supremely Honorable Majesty that the Vordanai Crown intends to do what is necessary to safeguard Borelgai interests.”

There were mutterings of assent from the courtiers.

“It would be a momentous step,” Orlanko said. “But if the sacrifice of our brave captain of Armsmen has accomplished nothing else, it has alerted us to the gravity of the situation. And yet. .” He paused, as though consulting a mental document. “Only the king or a regent can order the Royal Army into action, I seem to recall?”

“If the king could speak,” Torahn said, “he would tell us not to let the particulars of the law bind us at such a crucial moment.”

“On the contrary,” Orlanko said. “It is at such moments the niceties must be precisely observed, lest any hint of illegality taint our actions. Remember, my lord, we will be judged by history.”

Another silence. Orlanko scrupulously did not look at Rackhil Grieg, who had been briefed at length in the Cobweb for just this moment. He would heal, eventually, but the duke trusted he would not forget again where his interest lay. And, indeed, he spoke up right on cue.

“The answer seems simple enough, my lords,” Grieg said. “The king is incapacitated, and the princess has taken to her rooms. The Cabinet must propose a regent for the duration of the emergency. I nominate His Grace the duke.”

Torahn shot Grieg a sharp look, then turned slowly to Orlanko. “A regency?”

“It honestly had not occurred to me,” Orlanko drawled. “But if the Cabinet requires it, I shall of course be pleased to serve in that capacity, until the king recovers from his illness, or-”

“The king is dead,” came a voice from the back of the room, among the crowd of courtiers.

Amid the sudden explosion of whispering, a wedge of green uniforms became visible, pushing their way through the crowd. Orlanko got to his feet, though with his small stature this did not assist him much.

“What’s going on?” he said, loud enough to be heard over the growing babble. “Who’s that?”

“Make way,” bawled an Armsmen sergeant. “Make way for the Minister of Justice!”

Vhalnich. Orlanko forced a smile onto his face and sat back down. Damn him. I should have been warned. Concordat spies were in place all over Ohnlei, with instructions to report his movements, but apparently the man had evaded them somehow. His own Mierantai guard had established a cordon around his residence, and the backcountry soldiers had proven to be both competent and irritatingly unbribable.

Inside the flying wedge of Armsmen, Vhalnich walked beside another man, stoop-shouldered and fragile-looking. Orlanko’s breath caught as he recognized Doctor-Professor Indergast. How the hell did he get out of the king’s bedchamber?

“My lord Mieran,” Orlanko said aloud. “I’m glad you could join us.”

“I’m sorry to be late,” Vhalnich said. “As you can imagine, the Ministry is in a bit of an uproar.”

“And you have brought us the good doctor-professor,” Orlanko said. “Who, I’m sure-”

“What you said about the king,” Torahn snapped, interrupting. “Is it true?”

Indergast bowed his head, and the room went quiet as he spoke, everyone straining to hear the quavering words.

“It is. My lords, Your Grace, I regret to say that my skills have failed His Majesty in his last trial. I was able to remove the diseased mass, but the loss of blood and other strains overcame him. He is with the Savior now, until the end of time.”

“I see,” Orlanko said. He matched gazes with Vhalnich, whose wide gray eyes reflected the duke’s spectacle-obscured stare. “The nation will mourn.”

“It does not change the point at hand,” said Torahn.

“Which is?” Vhalnich said, settling into his chair after helping the doctor-professor to a stool.

“We must have troops to put down the riots,” the Minister of War said. “For that, we require a regent. The Minister of Finance has proposed His Grace the duke. Do you have any objection?”

“I am confused,” Vhalnich said. “The king is dead, but we now have a queen, who is of age to rule in her own right. What need for a regent?”

“The princess,” Orlanko said, “that is, the princess who was, and the queen who is, is clearly overcome by grief and the terrors of the moment. She has confined herself to her room these past three days. In time, perhaps, she will grow into her responsibilities, but for the moment-”

Vhalnich cut him off with a wave. The queue of courtiers was parting, of their own accord this time, like the bow wave preceding a ship. Leather creaked and silk rustled as they bowed.

Damn, damn, damn Vhalnich! He planned this from the start. Orlanko, no stranger to political theater, recognized the hand of an expert. None of it should have been possible, of course. If the princess left her rooms, I should have been alerted immediately. But he’d clearly underestimated Vhalnich’s influence.

The duke forced a grave expression onto his face and sat calmly as a quartet of Noreldrai Grays trooped into the room and took up stations beside the door. For now, he had to ride out this farce.

Raesinia seemed even smaller and frailer than usual, swaddled in a tissue of gray silk and black lace, with fringes of pearls that clacked rhythmically as she walked. She was doing her best to look the queen, but her young appearance betrayed her.

He suppressed a smile. Go ahead and put on your play. Let’s not forget who has the upper hand here. The people of Vordan would not long tolerate a queen who had made congress with a demon, and it would not be hard to arrange a public demonstration, should it become necessary.

“Orlanko,” she said, with a nod. “Ministers. Honored guests. It is painful that we must interrupt this time of mourning with affairs of state, but the crisis will brook no delay.”

“Indeed, Your Majesty.” Orlanko inclined his head. “We were just discussing what measures to take. Count Torahn had offered the army’s assistance in suppressing the rebellion.”

“No.” The single word rang out clearly, and a silence fell across the whispering courtiers.

Count Torahn cleared his throat. “With all due respect, Your Majesty, I believe there is no other way to restore order.”

“Vordan City has gone four generations without feeling the tread of a soldier’s boot,” Raesinia said curtly. “I would not have the first act of my reign be to break that honored compact.”

“Besides which,” Vhalnich murmured, “the Royal Army is, by and large, recruited from the same unfortunates who have taken to the streets. Who’s to say they would not simply join the mob?”

Torahn shot to his feet. “The loyalty of my soldiers is not in question! And as an officer yourself, you should be ashamed to make such an assertion-”

“Please.” Raesinia raised a hand. “What Count Mieran meant was only this. These are not foreigners in the streets, or heretics, or even rebels. They are good citizens of Vordan, with legitimate grievances. Any man might hesitate to stand against them, without any implications to his loyalty to the Crown.”

“They are a weak-willed mob,” Grieg said, “in the sway of a demagogue.”

“And what are their demands?” Raesinia said.

Vhalnich made a show of consulting a paper he took from his pocket. “To convene the Deputies-General to discuss the problems afflicting the nation.”

“A call for the august body that conferred the crown on my respected ancestor in the first place can hardly be treason,” Raesinia said. “I am inclined to grant their request. That will resolve the problem without the need for troops.”

“Apologies, Your Majesty, but it will not,” Torahn said. He was sweating. “The deputies of Farus the Great’s time were the nobles and lords of the land, men who understood the order of things. Any body convened from this rabble will only impose impossible demands on the Crown, demands that will be all the harder to refuse once given royal sanction-”

Orlanko got to his feet. “Your Majesty. If you’ll excuse me, I must attend to the latest reports from the Ministry.”

“Of course,” Raesinia said. She didn’t take her eyes from Torahn, but Vhalnich met Orlanko’s gaze. A smile flickered across the Minister of Justice’s face, just for an instant.

It wasn’t until he was back in the safe, well-ordered domain of the Cobweb that the duke once again began to feel secure.

Torahn might bluster and argue, but he would ultimately do nothing. And the princess-the queen-had obviously planned the whole affair with Vhalnich from the beginning. Orlanko had no illusions about what the “demands” of the Deputies-General would be. The mob was already tearing down Sworn Churches and hanging Borelgai from the lampposts, and who was more closely associated with the Borels and the Sworn Church than the despised Last Duke and his vicious Concordat?

It was a power play, nothing more and nothing less. Either Raesinia was smarter than he’d given her credit for, or else she was completely in Vhalnich’s pocket. Whichever it was, the two of them planned to use the backing of the mob to push him out of the Cabinet and away from the throne.

Vhalnich. It has to be Vhalnich. Orlanko’s fall might mean war with the Borelgai, a war Vordan could not hope to win, but such a sacrifice of life would not trouble a man like the Minister of Justice.

A thought struck him. Could Vhalnich himself bear a demon? The Pontifex of the Black had implied as much, in their last communication. At the time Orlanko had thought it unlikely. But if he really had found the Thousand Names, and invited one of the horrors into his own body. .

Orlanko shook his head and clumped through the corridors, ignoring the passing analysts who scurried out of his way. He was breathing hard by the time he pushed open the door to his office and clambered up behind his desk. Once there, he slammed his hand on one of the little buttons, causing a distant bell to dance and jangle.

Contingencies, contingencies. Vhalnich wasn’t the only one who held hidden cards.

The door clicked open, and Andreas entered noiselessly, dark coat flaring behind him like a living shadow.

“How the hell did Vhalnich get to the Cabinet room without my being informed he was even on the grounds?”

“We’re investigating now, sir. It appears a number of our agents are in his custody.”

“What?”

“His Mierantai guard rounded up our watchers and confined them in his cottage. It was quite a well-planned operation. No word escaped until we sent more men to investigate.”

Orlanko glowered at Andreas, who took it stolidly.

“Of course, sir, it means that our communications have been compromised. He knew precisely who was assigned to him.”

“I know, damn it.” Heads would roll for that. The pasty-faced analysts who lived in the depths of the Cobweb and copied out books of numbers all day long had assured him that their codes were unbreakable. We’ll see how unbreakable they are. But that would have to wait. “He’s stolen a march on us, and we can’t afford to play catch-up. I want you to call up the Special Branch.”

If there was any emotion under the serene mask, it didn’t show. Andreas bowed. “Of course, sir.”

Orlanko made a face, as though he’d eaten something unpleasant, and stared at his pet killer. He sighed. “All right. Now we’ll do things your way.”

IONKOVO

A single candle flickered on the other side of the room, casting a dim glow across the windowless cell. The bars were outlined on the opposite wall, a striped pattern that danced and shivered on the rough stone surface.

Adam Ionkovo, lying on the scratchy straw-stuffed pallet, stared at the ceiling and let out a sigh.

He’d had high hopes for Captain d’Ivoire. But. . no. Even a couple of conversations had shown him to be the kind of man whose blind, bulldog loyalty was impervious to reason. Neither bribes nor threats of eternal damnation would pry him loose from Vhalnich, not now. The bond between men who had fought together could tie them closer than lovers.

Did you get anything out of him, Jen? He was fairly certain his companion was dead. She bore an archdemon, after all. If she was alive, nothing could have stopped her from completing her mission. But it’s how she died that matters. Did Vhalnich find the Thousand Names? What powers has he unearthed?

Oh well. If d’Ivoire wasn’t going to talk, then it was pointless to remain here any longer. It was past time he was up and about.

The outer door rattled and opened a fraction. His guard, right on time with the evening meal. Time to go.

Ionkovo rolled off the pallet. Just in front of it was a thick, dark shadow cast by the table the candle was sitting on. The transition between light and darkness wavered as the flame shifted, and Ionkovo reached carefully over it to touch the floor where the shadow was constant.

“God save us,” he muttered in Elysian. “The Penitent Damned.”

The shadow moved under his fingers. It grew darker, black as ink, and rippled when he touched it as though his finger had brushed the surface of dark, still water. Ionkovo pushed himself forward just as the guard entered the room, diving into the shadow as easily as a seabird skimming to the ocean.

“The hell?” the guard said. He set the pewter plate bearing Ionkovo’s nightly beans and crust of bread on the table and put a hand on his truncheon. “Ionkovo? Are you playing games with me?”

Ionkovo was always surprised at the reluctance of ordinary people to accept the evidence of their own eyes. There was nowhere to hide in the cell; ergo, it should be obvious that he was not in it. But the guard only edged forward cautiously, brow furrowed.

The candle threw the man’s shadow on the wall behind him, larger than life. Its surface rippled, silently, and Ionkovo’s arm emerged. His fingers curved into a claw, reaching for the Armsman’s neck.

The man gave a strangled gasp as the grip closed, both hands automatically reaching up to pry the grip away from his throat. Ionkovo yanked hard, and the Armsman stumbled backward a step, then another. Then one more step, through where the wall ought to have been, and he fell into his own rippling shadow. The dark silhouette remained for a moment longer, then faded silently away.

Ionkovo released the guard and let him fall, screaming, into the endless void that was the no-place between the shadows. He pulled himself back out into the real world, out in the corridor, and let out a long breath.

There were no doubt a number of locked doors between him and the outside world. But it was the middle of the night, and most of the lamps were dark. The Guardhouse crawled with shadows.