The Wheel of Osheim

EIGHTEEN

I came to myself with a start, bewildered for a second, then guilty, hoping I had only rested in the chair a few moments. I stood and patted the empty scabbard at my hip. The room held no replacement sword.

“Surprised you there, you old witch!” I couldn’t manage a smile over the victory. It’d been a moment of madness, regretted almost immediately. Still, I hoped Martus had survived. How else would I take the credit for it at every opportunity for the rest of our lives?

“Lisa!” I meant Micha and Nia as well, but it was Lisa’s name that broke from me as the sudden realization hit me and I was off and running. If Hertet had gathered every guard in the compound to his side then the Inner Palace would be the place to go for safety. The DeVeer sisters would be there, sheltering under the new king’s wing with Darin’s child.

Nobody in the dark hall of the Poor Place foyer, no guard on the door. I took the front steps in one leap. The landing reminded me how badly my knee hurt. A sprint-hobble took me across the courtyard, through a passage, and across another courtyard bringing me to the Inner Palace. I angled for the guest wing.

“Stop!” A booming voice. “Stop right there!”

I halted ten yards shy of the entrance to the guest wing and turned to see a tall palace guardsman approaching, a squad of a dozen wall guards at his back, spears over their shoulders.

“I need to see-”

“Nobody can break the curfew.” The man’s voice was the kind of deep that sounds as though it must hurt. “By order of the king!”

I eyed him. Young, thick-thewed, a gleaming breastplate, his face the variety of handsome that declares an unabashed lack of imagination. “Your name, Guardsman?” I tried to sound in charge. Technically I was.

“Sub-captain Paraito.”

“Look, Sub-captain, I’m Prince Jalan.” I hadn’t the energy to put on my royal roar. “I need to check on my family, then I’m going to see Hertet so-”

“Put him in the cells with the other dissidents.” Paraito waved his men forward. Four of the chain-armoured wall guards came forward. I reached for my absent sword, something that was becoming both a habit and a liability.

“Look!” I found my roar as the four men reached for me. “I’m the marshal of this entire fucking city, appointed by the Red Queen herself, and in case you hadn’t noticed-Vermillion is under attack. Half of it’s burning and there are dead things stalking this very palace.” I slapped away the closest hand. “So if you plan on living to see the dawn I strongly advise you to bring me before my uncle. Right now!”

The sub-captain stared at me as two of his minions took my arms. The frown on his handsome brow suggested that I might perhaps have put a small dent in his surety. “We’ll take him to the court and let the king decide if he wants to see him.” He turned and led off.

“Wait!” I dug in my heels but started to walk as it became clear they would drag me. “Wait! Where are we going?” The palace man had set off back across the courtyard, directly away from the Inner Palace.

“The king has made court in Milano House.”

“But . . . that’s insane.” The palace was compromised and Hertet had set up as king in his old house? The Inner Palace had been the seat of kings for generations. Spells and wards layered the place thicker than any rugs or tapestries: it was a place of safety against dark magics. For all I knew any dead thing crossing its threshold would burn or turn to dust . . . or simply become the more traditional kind of corpse, cut free of the necromancer’s strings. I very much doubted Milano House enjoyed the same protections. Still, Uncle Hertet had been practising to be king beneath that roof for longer than I’d been alive. Perhaps he felt safest there. Perhaps the Red Queen’s throne scared him. It would me. Especially if my claim were premature . . .

Passing by Scribes’ Row I saw the wiry form of a mire-ghoul, stark against the moon, just for an instant as it crested the roof.

“There!” I twisted to free an arm and failed. “Up there, a ghoul!”

“Don’t see it.” Sub-captain Paraito glanced upward without breaking stride.

“Aren’t you at least going to send men to investigate?” I managed to shake off one of the guards. “Unhand me, you buffoon, my uncle is exactly who I want to see. I don’t have to be dragged there!”

“The king has ordered all men-at-arms to defend Milano House. Our patrols are to round up traitors and forewarn of any attack. We’re not to go chasing shadows.”

I shook my head and carried on walking. In all honesty the shadows would probably eat Paraito and his squad if they ventured into them.

I didn’t make another break for it until we passed within sight of Roma Hall. In one of the upper rooms a faint light escaped the shutters. I twisted free and took a stride. One more stride and I would have made it clear, but one of the wall guards, either by accident or design, got the haft of his spear tangled between my legs and I went down with two men piling on top of me.

They dragged me up, spitting grit from the flagstones.

“Bind the prisoner!” Sub-captain Paraito nodded to one of his squad.

“I wasn’t trying to escape, you idiot!” An echo of berserker rage rang through me and more guardsmen stepped in to help hold my arms. “Prince Darin’s wife and child are alone in Roma House with a necromancer.” I took a deep breath as they looped the rope about my hands. “I’ll remind you again. I’m a prince, and the marshal of this whole damn city! If you let my sister-in-law die . . . Wait! The necromancer! He’s a threat to Hertet-the king, I mean. It’s your duty to-”

“It’s my duty to enter the information in my report.” The sub-captain motioned his men on, and on they went, dragging me while I fought my bonds.

As we approached Milano House I saw a host of armoured men drawn up around its walls, torches burning in such profusion as to light the entire courtyard. I saw members of the palace guard, the throne-room elite, the wall guard, the grounds guard, the aristocratic remnants of the Red Lance, Long Spear, and Iron Hoof cavalries, prison guards from the Marsail keep, even house guards from the noble houses.

“Alphons!” I spotted one of Father’s men in the host gathered before the front steps. “Alphons! Is Lady Micha safe? Lady Lisa?”

He shouted something but I only caught the word “double” before my captors forced me up the front steps along a narrow corridor of armoured knights. The great bronze doors opened a begrudging two feet, allowing us to file into the crowded entrance hall.

“Keep a tight hold on him.” And Paraito left us, presumably to file his report.

I stood there, sweaty, hurting, and above all furious. Every person crammed into the entrance hall appeared to be talking at once, the tide of conversation making only the slightest of dips when I was brought in. The antechamber held a dozen clusters of lords, the occasional lady, a few barons, an earl, even merchants plumped up in their most expensive finery, all talking at each other, some jovial, some worried, some heated. I saw Duchess Sansera wearing her age tonight, along with all her diamonds, Lord Gren, my old adversary in matters of gambling on both horses and men, looking more nervous here than he ever did at the pits, a score more highborn who might be expected to speak for me. A few glanced my way but the ropes on my wrists discouraged any from coming forward.

“We can’t just stand here!” I looked around at the four men detailed to guard me, a distinctly dowdy presence amid the silks and gold of the high and the mighty. “You saw what it’s like out there . . . You-”

“Cousin Jalan!” Hertet’s second-eldest son, Roland, came in through the main doors, spotting me immediately. Martus called him “the Chinless Wonder,” and to be fair the growing of a sort of beard to hide that fact, and siring the Red Queen’s first great grandson, did rank highest among his few notable achievements. “Father will want to see you!”

I met his watery blue eyes, he seemed oblivious to the fact I was under guard. I, managed a smile and nodded. “Lead on.” And with a swirl of his emerald cape, embroidered with the trefoils that Uncle Hertet had adopted for his branch of the Kendeth family tree, Cousin Roland led on.

“A moment, cousin!” I stopped Roland as we approached the doors to the great hall. “You know the DeVeers? Everyone does.” I didn’t give him pause to answer. “A necromancer has taken St. Agnes. I fear Lisa and Micha DeVeer may still be in the main house with my infant niece. It would be a great favour to me if you could dispatch a squad of men to ensure they have escaped and to bring them to safety if need be.”

“A necromancer?” Roland mangled the “r’s and left his mouth open in surprise. “In the palace?”

“In the church. At Roma Hall. A baby in peril!” I nodded and kept it simple. I hoped mention of the baby might stir him, as a father. “You could send some guardsmen.”

Roland blinked. “Most certainly.” He raised his hand and beckoned. “Sir Roger! Sir Roger!” A short knight in the shiniest armour I’d ever seen clanked awkwardly toward us. “Ladies in distress at Roma Hall, Sir Roger!” Roland made a “Woger” of each “Roger.”

“I shall attend to the matter, Prince Roland.” Roger, pockmarked and sporting a thick black moustache, gave a curt bow, all efficiency and purpose.

“Take a dozen men, Sir Roger.” All the advice I could offer as Roland continued toward the doors. “Good ones!”

Cousin Roland elbowed past the elite guardsmen at the entrance to his father’s court, four of them in the queen’s fire-bronze armour beneath her scarlet plumes. He set both hands to the towering oak panels and pushed into the great hall.

I hadn’t been into the great hall at Milano House since Roland’s wedding when I was thirteen. Father and his eldest brother had fallen out over some matter concerning the disciplining of the house-priest. It wasn’t really about the priest, of course-it was about who got to boss who around, as are most disputes among brothers. In any event, heavy words were lightly thrown and Father led his brood from the hall in high dudgeon, Martus forcibly detaching a slightly drunk young Prince Jalan from a pretty young bridesmaid whose name I forget.

In the subsequent decade the hall had changed beyond recognition. Dozens of bejewelled lanterns joined to cast a brilliant light across what was undeniably the most splendidly appointed room I’d ever laid eyes on. The tapestries behind Hertet’s mahogany throne were of gold-and-silver wire, the rugs of Indus silk, colours so vivid they assaulted the eye. Suits of gilt armour stood around the perimeter of the hall, intermixed with Grandmother’s guard, so immobile that it was hard to say at a glance which armour stood empty and which held men.

The throne room proved less crowded than the chamber before it, with thirty or so of Uncle’s favourites gathered around, wine goblets in hand, servants hovering. I saw a dozen familiar but anonymous lords, Sir Grethem all in armour as if prepared for one of the tourneys that made his reputation, Lady Bellinda, stood close to the centre, the most recent and youngest of Hertet’s long string of mistresses. And beside her, perhaps Hertet’s most powerful supporter, the Duke of Grast, a burly fellow sporting a thick grey beard, a man I might have spread the odd cruel rumour about over the years after he caught me with his sister.

Hertet’s ebony chair stood on a dais and rose above him, the back spreading in a dramatic scroll, the lines of it tracked with inset rubies, returning the lantern light and turning to glowing drops of blood.

None of this splendour exerted quite such a draw on my eye as the crown upon the new king’s head. Grandmother’s imperial crown, a heavy thing of iron, honouring the bloodiest of her ancestors and the days of the Red March when we were warriors one and all. Centuries had softened the thing with a wealth of diamonds and a tracery of red-gold, but it still spoke of power won by the sword and the bow.

Hertet looked lost in the dark grip of his throne, swamped by a voluminous robe of cloth-of-gold, worked all over in elaborate whorls and spirals of the Brettan kind. I followed in Roland’s wake, noting my uncle’s unhealthy pallor as he sweated beneath the crown, more haggard than he had been at Father’s funeral that morning.

“Father!” Roland’s slight speech impediment managed to put a comic edge on most words. A kinder sire would have changed his son’s name to John when the problem with “r’s became apparent. Roland pushed past another couple of lords and raised both his hand and his voice. “Father! I’ve found Prince Jalan, come to swear to you!”

Roland stepped aside to present me, his gaze falling to my bound wrists for the first time, with some confusion, now taking in the torn and blood-spattered clothes.

“Nephew. I commend you for being the first of Reymond’s boys to bend the knee . . . but you’ve come before me in rags and ropes? Some new fashion perhaps? Heh? Heh?”

His barked laughter sparked the court-in-waiting into sycophantic echoes, tittering at the state of me. I supposed they might now just be called “the court” since the waiting appeared to be over.

Hertet raised both hands, a tolerant call for quiet. “So where are those brothers of yours? Martus should be offering his fealty. He’s head of your house now, no? Until the pope’s new cardinal evicts the lot of you at least!” More laughter at that.

“Martus holds the enemy before the palace walls at your command . . . Uncle.” I couldn’t call him king, not yet. “I last saw him about to charge a rag-a-maul. I don’t know if-”

“A what?” Hertet asked.

The Duke of Grast stepped in before I could reply, cold eyes upon me. “A rag-a-maul, majesty. The peasants’ word for the dust-devils that blow up from time to time. They hold them to be haunted.”

“Heh! Heh! That boy! I always said he’d fight wind if he hadn’t anyone else to battle! Didn’t I say that, Roland? Didn’t I?” Hertet wiped the grey straggles from his forehead as the dutiful laughter followed.

“I don’t know if Martus survived.” I raised my voice. “And Darin is dead, killed behind the city walls by dead men who over-ran the Appan Gate. The outer city is burning. We have-”

“Yes. Yes.” Hertet’s brow furrowed beneath the crown, irritation showing in his voice. “Aren’t you the marshal, Nephew? Shouldn’t you be out there putting a stop to all this? Or are you unequal to the task?” He looked nervous as much as angry, twitchy in the throne.

I sensed a weakness in him. I would never get the help needed at the gate if I let them laugh me from the court, so I attacked. “How did you get the crown, Uncle?” The sparkle of the diamonds captured my eye. “It was locked in the royal treasury.” My father had told me about the iron vault. The first Gholloth spent a small fortune to defend a large fortune. Turkmen master smiths travelled from the east to build it in situ. In time the vault might be breached-but so quickly? “The Red Queen keeps the key.”

Silence followed the scattered gasps at my temerity. Hertet reached into the golden collar of his robes and drew forth Loki’s key, making slow rotations on the end of a twisted silver chain. “It didn’t take any effort to wrest this from that ugly old man she keeps in the tower. Much safer with me, and so good at opening doors! You wouldn’t believe the secrets I’ve found or how much gold dear Mother had stashed away . . .”

“You took it?” Of course he had. Garyus wouldn’t give it to an idiot nephew, not while he was steward. “It’s a bad idea to take that key from anyone. It needs to be given.”

“Nonsense.” He twitched, then forced a smile. “I’m king and I’ll take what I like. It’s mine by right. And none of your concern. Take those silly ropes off and bend the knee. Then you can get back to what you’re supposed to be doing. Or shall I appoint somebody more competent?”

Every instinct tried to put me on my knees but one question kept me standing. “Is Garyus . . . alive?”

Hertet frowned. “Of course he is. I’m no monster. He’s locked up safe until he sees things my way. Some-” He shot a glance into the glittering line of courtiers closest to the throne. “Some advised a sudden and sharp solution. But those times are behind us now. I am not my mother.”

I’d been on one knee from the moment I heard Garyus was alive. I’ve always been happy to abandon my pride if it gets in the way of ambition, whether that be escape or a tumble in a lady’s bed. Hertet could have my allegiance, it really wasn’t worth much. “My king, I need the palace guard at the Appan Gate, and all the men that can be rounded up from the Seventh. A battle is raging there and we are not winning. If the gate falls the palace will fall-it’s not built for defence. Our men-atarms will serve you better at the city wall.”

Hertet tucked Loki’s key away and frowned. “You would leave your king unguarded? At the mercy of any dissenters who can gather a mob? That’s hardly a demonstration of your loyalty to the crown, Marshal!”

Voices rose in agreement on several sides, not just the sycophants but genuine self-interest. Sending your guards out of sight while the city burns and battle rages is never an easy sell. Rather like throwing away your sword whilst being chased it feels like a damn stupid thing to do.

I returned to my feet, awkward with my hands still bound. “Majesty, you fail to understand the scale of the threat. Thousands of dead men crowd the city wall, ten thousand perhaps. If they are able to take the Appan Gate and enter in force then Vermillion is lost. The palace, this house, would fall within an hour. The city wall is our only defence and it is the only place where our numbers can tell. The men outside your door are wasted-at the gate they may yet turn the tide. Prince Rotus and Princess Serah are with our forces there. They need support.” I saw a measure of conflict on Hertet’s face. He might be stupid, but not entirely stupid. I suspected most of his current measures were the result of paranoia, the possibly valid belief that his family, or the city, or both, would reject his claim to the throne and set some younger and more capable Kendeth in the Red Queen’s seat.

“Tell Father about the necromancer, Jalan!” Roland at my shoulder, helpfully muddying the waters.

“Necromancer?” Hertet shifted forward, hands gripping the arms of his throne.

“There’s a sub-captain in the foyer claiming there are dead men roaming the courtyards and ghouls on the rooftops!” Some newly-arrived lord far behind me at the main doors.

I spread my hands as far as the ropes allowed. “It’s only a hint of what’s coming if we don’t hold the Appan Gate. These are just scouts and still the palace walls mean nothing to them!”

“Necromancers and dead men on my very doorstep!” Hertet rose from the throne, colouring crimson, voice rising toward a shout. “And you try to send away my personal guard?”

“Vermillion will fall! You must-”

“Must?” Hertet swung his head left then right as if seeking echoes of his outrage. “Must? I am the king of Red March, from sea to sea, and there is no ‘must’!”

“Listen to me!” I shouted to be heard.

“Put Prince Jalan in the cells. Let him cool his temper and find his reason.” Hertet fell back into his chair, anger spent as quickly as it came. “Marshal Roland, gather fifty men of the grounds guard and take the situation at the Appan Gate in hand. I expect a report in the morning.”

“This is insane!” I made to climb the dais, but strong arms already had me, dragging me toward the exit. “You’ll all die here if you follow this idiot-” A heavy fist took the treason from my mouth and the rest of the world followed into darkness a moment later.