The Complete Legends of the Riftwar Trilogy

  But had they been sleeping? Had they perhaps experienced a moment of awareness of what was upon them?

  Probably not, or they would have raised an outcry. But he had to know, and he couldn’t ask them.

  Or maybe he could, come to think of it.

  He forced himself to pull down the sheets and examine the bodies.

  They were covered with blood, and the room stank from the way that both the Baron and his lady had voided themselves in death, but there were no wounds on their hands or arms, just on their necks.

  Kethol rubbed at an old scar on his left hand. If you didn’t have anything else to put in the way of a blade, you would use your hand, by reflex, particularly if the blade was going for your face. He had done just that, twice, and had become devout about always keeping a spare knife or two handy, after that time in Dungaran.

  But no: from all the evidence, somebody – or somebodies – had simply crept into the room while the two were sleeping, and suddenly slit their throats right at the base of the neck, either both at the same time, or so quickly that neither had had the time to awaken and try to hold off the attacker. Kethol was puzzled. He didn’t think a man could strike one victim fast enough to silence her – and he presumed that she was killed first to keep her from waking up shrieking – then kill her lover without him stirring. It would take speed few men possessed.

  Kethol found himself thinking, speed to match what Durine had told him he had seen in Baron Verheyen when he crossed blades with the Swordmaster. He moved to the head of the bed. Yes, a flick with the tip of the sword, starting at the base of the Lady’s neck and an upward thrust, then a downward jab with the point of the blade into the Baron’s throat, slicing outward. Yes, it was possible one man alone could do this if he were fast enough.

  Very professional. Kethol could admire the workmanship with part of his mind, even while the other part wanted to get a rag to clear the caked blood from Lady Mondegreen’s chin. He pulled up the sheet to cover both of them, as it didn’t seem right for him to be looking down at a naked noblewoman, not even in death.

  It probably hadn’t hurt much, or long. Kethol didn’t quite understand it, but there were some wounds, even fairly deep ones, that just oozed blood out, and were, if you could get attention quickly enough, usually survivable, although if you got even an oozing belly wound, it would fester and kill, and it would usually be over in a matter of days.

  Others spurted blood in a short fountain, and could kill a man in a few heartbeats. Or a horse, for that matter – it had been only yesterday that he had admired the way that Tom Garnett’s soldier had dispatched his broken-legged horse with a similar, clean wound.

  It would be interesting to know that man’s name, although it probably didn’t mean much.

  He searched the floor of the room, unsurprised to find that the knife wasn’t there. It almost certainly wasn’t in the room at all, although he would search carefully for it, just in case.

  Or was it? Was it there in plain sight? Could the killer have used Baron Morray’s own knife?

  No. The folded clothes on the chair were just clothes. The killer couldn’t have used Baron Morray’s belt-knife, because it was undoubtedly on his swordbelt in his own suite of rooms, along with his sword. The Baron, of course, hadn’t thought to bring along a weapon when he had come to drink a late-night toast with his lady, just a bottle and two glasses.

  It was hard to tell how much of the wine had splashed on the floor when the bottle had been overturned, but when Kethol carefully lifted it up from its side, there was still a small amount remaining in it.

  Kethol wanted a drink as badly as he had ever wanted one, but he corked the bottle and set it aside.

  Baron Morray hadn’t seemed to be an overly sentimental man, and Kethol certainly wasn’t, but Kethol hoped that the Baron wouldn’t mind if Kethol drank a toast to him, later.

  Later.

  A bell-rope hung near the bed, and Kethol pulled it. He wasn’t sure exactly how the system worked, although he had been down in the kitchens, once, and had seen the rack of bells mounted on the wall, each one with a slightly different sound. It didn’t matter – whichever servant appeared, Kethol would just have him or her send for the housecarl.

  Ereven, the housecarl, was at the door in just a matter of a few moments, his eyes locked on Kethol’s, as though if he stared hard enough at the soldier, he could ignore the bodies on the bed.

  ‘Yes, Captain?’

  Some things never changed. The housecarl’s normal glum expression was firmly in place.

  But his schedule had been out. The dampness of his face and the bleeding nick at the point of his jaw showed that he had put off shaving until mid-morning, which wasn’t his usual habit. Kethol had never paid the housecarl much attention, but he had never seen him other than freshly shaved, and Kethol assumed that he had had to do that both day and night.

  ‘How long have you been housecarl here?’

  Ask questions, Pirojil had said. The obvious question – who murdered these two people? – didn’t exactly seem worth asking. If he knew the answer to that, Ereven would surely have mentioned it.

  ‘I’ve served Earl Vandros and his father for all of my life, Captain, as did my father before me. I started off as a boy in the kitchen, washing dishes, and I have held every position on the Earl’s household staff, save for pastry cook and nursemaid.’ He smiled and shook his head. ‘I never could manage egg whites well enough to get a popover to loft well enough, and –’

  ‘Enough.’ If Kethol didn’t stop the housecarl, he would probably go on for the whole day. It was often that way with taciturn people – once you got them talking, you could hardly make them stop. ‘But housecarl – chief servitor – how long?’

  ‘Six years, Captain. Ever since Old Thomas died.’

  ‘Then you would, presumably, know about any secret passages in the castle?’

  Ereven blinked. ‘There aren’t any –’

  ‘This isn’t the time for discretion,’ Kethol said. ‘Normally, I’d be more than happy for LaMut Castle to keep its own secrets, but if the murderer came in through one of those secret passages, it would be sort of nice to know where they are, wouldn’t it?’

  Ereven nodded. ‘I’m sure that that’s so, Captain, and there used to be secret passages, but the old earl had them all sealed up – at least, all of them that I know of.’ He stood silent for a moment, then shrugged and went on. ‘I think that there may be a secret exit from the Earl’s own chambers, still, and from the way that Fantus has been snaking himself down from the loft to the Aerie, I’m fairly sure that there’s some hidden way there.’ He shook his head. ‘But not in the guest wing.’

  He walked past the bed, towards the door to the garderobe, Kethol following.

  The garderobe itself was covered with a wooden seat, and Kethol idly wondered if it was at least theoretically possible for somebody to have made his way up the wall of the keep and into the room that way, through the open bottom of the garderobe.

  He lifted up the seat and looked down at the frozen midden heap on the snow below. No, the hole cut through the stone, which permitted the user to dump his wastes below, was barely large enough to admit a child, and certainly not a full-grown man, even if he had been able to climb the side of the wall.

  And he wouldn’t have been able to do that without leaving some marks on the ice-slickened outside wall, he decided: the dust that had covered the seat showed that it hadn’t been moved in some time. The nobles would, understandably, given the cold outside, prefer to use one of the thundermugs sitting on the stone floor next to the garderobe, instead, rather than exposing their private parts to the cold air.

  It was the wall opposite the fixture to which Ereven drew Kethol’s attention. He pulled back on an old tapestry – faded deer fadedly frolicking in a faded meadow – to reveal a wall of bricks set into the stone, the bricks apparently solidly mortared into place.

  ‘This was a small cabinet, with a wooden inset in the
back, when I was a boy,’ Ereven said, ‘and if you pushed up on the shelf that was here, and pushed on the moulding there,’ he said, touching his fingers to two spots on the bricks, ‘it would open into the back of the wardrobe in the Green Suite.’

  Kethol shoved on the bricks, and carefully examined the juncture of wall and ceiling, then of wall and floor. It wasn’t impossible, he guessed, that the whole bricked wall could swing on some hidden hinge – or even some part of it – but a close examination of the mortar revealed none of the hairline cracks that would surely have been there.

  ‘I can ask permission from Baron Viztria and Baron Langahan for you to examine it from the other side,’ Ereven said. ‘It’s still the wardrobe, but –’

  ‘We’ll skip asking anybody permission, but I will take a look.’

  There was none of the expected protest, either in word or on Ereven’s lined face. He simply nodded, accepting the necessity of it.

  And he’d take a close look at the other walls, too. And the wardrobe in Lady Mondegreen’s room; and at the walls behind every tapestry in the hall.

  It probably wouldn’t do any good, mind, but at least it was something he could do.

  ‘You can go back to your duties now,’ Kethol said.

  ‘Yes, Captain.’ Ereven’s face was impassive as always. ‘Father Kelly has asked me to tell him when he may prepare the bodies for the funerals.’

  ‘Is that something you’ve done, too?’

  ‘Yes, Captain,’ Ereven said. ‘Helping with it, that is. I wrapped the old earl in his cremation shroud with my own two hands, since you ask.’

  Was there a flash of anger behind the flat speech and the expressionless face?

  ‘Is that something that I should ask of the Swordmaster, or is this part of your … authority, sir?’

  Kethol didn’t know, but he didn’t want to admit it. Admitting ignorance was a luxury, right now. Pirojil had said that they had to look and act as if they knew what they were doing, and an honest admission that he didn’t have any real idea where his authority began and ended didn’t seem sensible, any more than making an honest admission that he didn’t have the slightest idea what he was looking for.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But not until sundown, just in case my colleagues need to see what I’ve seen here.’

  ‘Yes, Captain.’ If Ereven wanted to know what Kethol had seen, or if the two bodies lying on the bed in death had affected him, he made no attempt to ask. Without another word, he turned and left the room, leaving Kethol alone with the dead.

  He took a last long look at the Lady Mondegreen, her pale face looking serene in death. How could she feel the pain of the blade yet remain asleep? She should have been lying there with eyes wide in pain, her features contorted with fear, not looking as if she but slumbered.

  Kethol wiped at the tears forming in his eyes as he said a silent farewell to the Lady.

  Damn, but this dust was getting to be annoying.

  • Chapter Fourteen •

  Plans

  THE NOBLES TURNED TO WATCH.

  Milo and the dwarf entered the Great Hall reluctantly, gingerly, with quick side glances at the nobles gathered along the far side, and halted under the archway. They looked for all the world as though they would rather have been anywhere else than here.

  Pirojil share that feeling more than a little.

  Rising, Pirojil gestured to Baron Viztria to say seated where he was, in the only other occupied chair next to the small hearth, and walked over to where Milo and the dwarf waited, shuffling nervously.

  For once, Viztria didn’t complain, although all throughout Pirojil’s interview with him he had been emitting an almost nonstop series of complaints, combined with, as far as Pirojil could tell, no useful information.

  Viztria claimed he had spent the entire evening – including dinner, ‘which was adequate, under the circumstances, although the meat had been decidedly overdone, and there wasn’t enough garlic in the world to hide the gamy taste of a boy-lamb that had been slaughtered months past its prime,’ he had observed – in pleasant conversation with the others in the Great Hall. That lasted until the celebration over the mid-evening announcement of Morray and Verheyen’s decision to put their difficulties behind them had led to a great many toasts, and much relief. ‘Despite the inadequate training and supervision of the castle’s bumbling servants that led the thumb-fingered clods always to neglect to properly air a wine before serving it – and never mind the fact that the Earl’s cellars were poorly stocked in the first place, although a gentleman had to make allowances here, out in the middle of nowhere, after all,’ he had added. Viztria then went on to explain to Pirojil that later, in the company of Langahan, he had walked up the stairs to the guest rooms – past the entirely awake guard, and since Viztria now knew that guards in LaMut habitually fell asleep on duty, that failure would surely be of great interest to some in Krondor! – and gone up the provincially uncarpeted stone steps, then down the hall into the suite that he shared with Baron Langahan. Viztria had then proceeded into his own bedroom after using the garderobe for one of its intended purposes and, since a certain impudent breveted captain apparently wanted to know all the details of matters that were none of his concern, Baron Viztria had, indeed, pissed like a racing horse. Then, without any prompting on Pirojil’s part, Viztria added, ‘And if the Captain needed further information, the name “Viztria” is a contraction of an ancient Delkian phrase meaning “dark snake” or “black serpent”, a nickname of the founder of the line, which referred both to the relatively swarthy complexion that I, the present Baron Viztria, have not entirely inherited, and to other, rather more impressive, anatomical characteristics which I most certainly have inherited, thank you very much, which is why I’ve petitioned the Royal Heraldry Guild to add a Black Python to my family’s coat of arms!’

  Pirojil nodded and said nothing. After relieving himself, Viztria had gone back into his sleeping chamber and stripped off his clothes quicker than a fifteen-year-old nobleman’s daughter from Rillanon could shuck her first ballgown in the back seat of a closed carriage, and was fast asleep before his head hit the pillow, and if there were no further insulting questions, he would just as soon let the Captain get on to insulting somebody else …

  Pirojil found himself relieved to leave Viztria behind him, and joined Milo and the dwarf, beckoning them to follow him into an alcove off the Great Hall. The alcove contained a table which was used by servants when the Earl held a gala in the hall, but currently it was empty.

  ‘You sent for us, Captain?’ Milo asked, as though there was any question of it.

  ‘If he didn’t, there’s a regular who’s going to be missing a few teeth,’ Mackin said.

  ‘Yes, I sent for you,’ Pirojil said as he leaned back against the table. ‘I’ve got until noon to finish questioning the nobles –’

  ‘About the murder?’ asked the dwarf.

  ‘No, about their preference in linen and flowers.’ Milo shut his companion up with a quick slap to the back of the head.

  Mackin was about to object to the rude treatment, when Pirojil said, ‘Yes, about the murder. You’ve heard?’

  ‘Shit, captain,’ Mackin said, ‘everybody has heard, including those poor bastards out marching in the snow, from what I was hearing as Kelly and his men were chivvying one bunch out of the gates this morning.’

  Milo nodded. ‘Yeah. We’ve even heard that you and the other two have been put in charge of finding out who did the two of them.’ His smile seemed almost genuine. ‘Better you than me, eh?’

  ‘Yes, you’ve heard right.’

  ‘Well, it seems to me that you’d better come up with the killer quickly, because the Morrays already have their candidate, and the Verheyens are looking halfway between scared shitless and furious.’ He rubbed his thumb and first two fingers together. ‘And some of the others have been able to add one dead lady and one dead bursar, and start worrying about whether our noble employers are going to decide that it?
??s easier to kill the help than pay it off.’

  Pirojil held up a hand. ‘You can relax about that,’ he said. ‘It’s being seen to.’

  An officer had to be able to lie to the men, and tell them everything was fine. How it was being handled and by whom wasn’t what Pirojil was trying to concentrate on at the moment, although it would be handy if Kethol happened to find the magical passphrase to the strongroom in Baron Morray’s suite of rooms. The Earl of LaMut and his predecessor hadn’t been fools, and would surely have allowed for the possibility of all of the few possessors of that secret being killed, and put in place some scheme to deal with that eventuality.

  Pirojil liked his own theory about the pass-phrase being hidden somewhere in Baron Morray’s rooms, although he probably wouldn’t have known what it was if he was looking right at it, and wouldn’t have wanted to test it out, even if he was pretty sure that he had the right one.

  It was likely that the Swordmaster would know where it was, or at least know how to get to it, but it was even more likely that Steven Argent would very much not appreciate being nagged about such – to him – trivial matters as paying the men, not at the moment.

  And he would have had a point.

  Pirojil turned to the dwarf. ‘Mackin, what I want you to do is get the captains together – all of them – and get a moment-by-moment description of everything they did last evening.’

  ‘Can’t do it.’ Mackin shook his head. ‘Four of them are out with the marchers.’

  ‘Then get all the rest, on my authority – any who object, send them straight to the Swordmaster. I think that’ll convince them to behave. They can meet you down in the dungeon. Tom Garnett is busy keeping an eye on Erlic, and I’d like them all there.’

  ‘Giving orders to captains, eh?’ the dwarf smiled too broadly. ‘I could get used to that.’

  ‘Better not.’ Milo cocked his head to one side. ‘And for me?’

  ‘Just a moment. Mackin, why are you still just standing there?’