Taskin tracked Jussoud’s deliberate tread as he returned to his cushion and sat down. While the healer recovered his goblet of sennia, the commander inquired with acid tenacity, ‘Just when did you know your bold fellow for certain?’
Jussoud set down his drink with a nettled clink. ‘Fires of mercy, would you have asked him?’ Before Taskin’s straight silence, which said beyond doubt, that no measure was too stiff for Sessalie’s security, the nomad healer tucked his robe under his folded knees as though to ward off a chill. ‘I knew when I went to the barracks this morning, and found the shaman’s ward on his sword hilt.’
Taskin leaned forward. ‘Not desert work?’
‘No.’ Jussoud returned a stunned shake of his head, as always bemused by the commander’s exhaustive, sharp faculties. ‘Mykkael is not tribal, his birth people never owned him. The lines he bears on his sword are Sanouk. A protection like that could only have been sung by our shamans, in gratitude, on the hour Mykkael left our camp.’ Finding his goblet depleted, Jussoud used the oil lamp to refire the coals underneath his squat iron pot. Then, easy nature restored, he provoked, ‘Had I known you were holding an interrogation, I’d have offered a pitcher of water.’
‘No water,’ said Taskin. ‘We’re trying to forestall tears. I promise I’ll pay you a social call once Princess Anja is safe, and this threat posed by sorcerers is over.’ He wrinkled his nose at the pungency of warmed sennia. ‘If you don’t burn your vocal cords drinking that stuff, I’m not done with today’s round of questions. What of Mysh kael’s history with Prince Al-Syn-Efandi? Do you know aught of his flight from Rathtet?’
Jussoud stared. ‘From Rathtet? Bright stars of my ancestry, did he say that? If he did, that should show you his bitter reluctance to speak.’
Taskin handed over the padded cloth to allow the heated pot to be handled. ‘Go on.’
Jussoud refilled his shell goblet, swirled the melted liquid inside until it assumed the consistency of hot glue. ‘To win free, your captain had to cross through the battle lines. Our record, taken from Orannia’s ravings, says this: he took twenty-five. They were his best fighters, the core of his troop, and closer than brothers, or family. One by one, he watched them die. Or go mad. He had Eishwin’s mark in his favour. Most didn’t. The few who stayed sane arranged the diversion, and Mykkael pressed through, alive. He kept those struck to madness upright on their feet, made them bear weapons and keep fighting. He endured horrors our shamans would not suffer our scribes to record to keep his oath and bring the Efandi princess to safety. He cosseted his band of survivors through, drove them beyond near starvation and disease to get back into friendly territory. Perhaps he held on out of hope their ruined minds could be recovered. Perhaps he did so because he had no one left, and the Efandi princess still to guard.’
‘They couldn’t be cured, then?’ Taskin asked quietly.
Jussoud shook his head. ‘Most killed themselves, after. What use to grieve? They had no future, no hope to win free. But my sister had family with Sanouk beliefs. Our customs will not embrace suicide. Mykkael tended her needs, saw her through the long journey home. Yet even our shamans could not recall her to reason. The Rathtet lines of sorcery burn in her mind without surcease. She still wakes up screaming from nightmares and deranged memory. Night and day, she is guarded from sharp objects.’
The last question fell light as a whisper against the backdrop of quiet. ‘Mysh kael would not leave her before he was banished?’
Jussoud sighed, ran a troubled hand through his hair. ‘The last entry in the record was sealed by the ideograph for everlasting endurance. Mykkael had no place to go, after all. No troop, no cadre of specialized, trained officers. All his savings and supply trains were lost when the Efandi capitol was sacked. The princess he saved holds his debt, but no revenue. He became a lone sword, with no standing, then finally no hope, I should think. The subsequent wound that ruined his knee would have forced his retirement from mercenary service.’
‘Why can’t you swear to his honesty, then?’ Taskin pressured.
Jussoud’s eastern face showed the bitterest grain of his sadness. ‘Because I know him through my sister’s letters, the sane ones she wrote through the years when she served with his troop. Her heart saw the truth with all of love’s dangerous clarity. Mykkael is a man who holds to integrity before honour. Ethics mean more than his promise. He will act on his human principles, first, and see himself damned if an oath, and right choice, should come to be set into conflict.’
Taskin heard through the last testimony, the braid trim at his shoulders straight as ruled brass in the flame light. His gratitude stayed silent. He held no regret. Nor would he demean the scouring exchange pressed to closure with the syrup of pretentious apology. ‘I am satisfied,’ he said. ‘As long as no man comes forward with evidence that Mysh kael has broken his sworn bond, the king’s word of trust can be used to stay the prejudice of the crown council.’ He arose, then, regretful for the last order he must issue before leaving the healer in peace.
‘Jussoud, would you take one further duty amiss? I need you to call down to the gate keep tonight to dress that insolent desertman’s back.’
The nomad pushed his filled goblet aside, his black brows set into a frown of thunderstruck tolerance. ‘I’ll braid up my hair, then. How many stripes did he make you lay on him?’
Taskin answered, his proud head faced forward, that not even Jussoud should observe the irritation and grief that made shreds of his iron-clad bearing. ‘On the streets, you’ll hear twelve. I’m not known to deceive. For the sake of the kingdom, and my peace of mind, please make damned sure you strip him in private.’
XIII. Night
THE LATECOMERS WHO TURNED OUT TO HELP SEARCH FOR THE PRINCESS PILED UP AT THE MIDDLEGATE GUARDHOUSE. DRAWN BY THE REWARD, or else moved by concerned generosity, their press in the street almost rivalled last night’s crowd of celebrants. On foot, since Taskin’s industrious watch officer had dispatched his horse back to stabling, Mykkael paused in the shadow outside the flood of the gatehouse torches. Still stinging from the commander’s cavalier handling, he sized up the adventurers who had gathered for audience with Crown Prince Kailen. They were a mixed lot.
Grizzled farmers who smelled of hayfields and sweat came to loan their leashed hounds for tracking. Dairy maids and goatboys who had been searching the hedgerows rubbed shoulders with velvet-clad merchants and liveried servants. Jammed chock-a-block against the middlegate’s brick wall, weather-beaten caravan guards in dusty leathers swapped tales of road hazards and bandits with itinerant tinkers and wagoners. Two redcheeked laundresses gossiped with a frocked housemaid, while a young girl with emerald ribbons flirted with a bravo bearing a sword that looked like an ancestral relic.
Mykkael mapped their collective mood: caught the notes of disaffected anxiety, deferred hunger, and strained temper that would jealously guard the established position in line. No slinking tactic acquired in the field would let him slip past unobserved.
The garrison captain snapped off a coarse phrase in dialect, damning Taskin under his breath. Then he shifted raw shoulders beneath his sheathed sword. Chin raised, face bare, he prepared to brazen his way through.
At first, darkness covered him. The harsh shadows thrown by the torches masked the vivid stains on his shirt. As he worked into the press, recognition drew surprised murmurs of ‘Captain!’ followed by the inevitable flurry of movement as petitioners shifted aside. Brisk, but not hurrying, Mykkael reached the gate keep; and like the stir of cold breeze from behind, the first voices exclaimed. Fingers pointed in salacious discovery.
Unflinching, the captain arrived at the checkpoint. He met and passed by his posted sentry’s shocked gasp; disregarded the sharp looks of inquiry. The watch officer’s stunned questions were handled the same way: Mykkael ignored them. As if the bleeding marks of fresh punishment were nothing outside of the ordinary, he demanded a summary report of the traffic since sundown, point blank.
The o
fficer gaped, caught Mykkael’s bark of reprimand, then snapped to and started reciting. When his list was complete, with the abnormally high numbers of Devall’s off-duty honour guard duly noted, the captain revised standing orders. He dispatched his gawping gate sentries to sort out the adventurers and free the clogged street. Then he strode on his way, without rising to comment, as speculation sparked like wildfire between the men-at-arms left at their posts.
‘D’you think they’d have shackled him?’
‘No man would dare!’
‘If he did, he’d be dead, no doubt about it.’
‘…without chain, who could hold him?’
‘…suppose it was Taskin. Old icicle dick. Sprang from the womb with a sword in one hand, and a pair o’ steel bollocks in the other.’
‘Could’ve handled our captain, maybe, but powers of glory! What disgrace on the record could have remanded a commissioned crown officer for a lashing?’
A burst of rough laughter from the gatehouse wardroom echoed down the dark street. ‘Oh, get real, man! A sand-bred cur holding a crown captaincy on his merits, and that’s not a rank provocation?’
Mykkael chose the straightest route down the thoroughfare, past the lit fronts of the wine shops. Hard-tempered nerves from his years as a mercenary let him ignore the jeers of the dandies; the derision elicited from tradesmen and shopgirls; the vindictive hoots from the derelicts his men-at-arms had often collared for feisty conduct. Of far more concern to his wary ear, the sword in the sheath at his back: he listened, intent, to its silence. Yet no hum of warning arose from the shaman’s lines sung into its warded hilt.
That quiet provided him small reassurance. Mykkael’s senses crawled. Each passing second touched a pulse of tingling dread through his skin. Danger moved on the wind, a coil of moving intent that lurked, waiting, just under the range of his instincts. Attuned to the triphammer beat of his heart, he grazed against the black reflection of Anja’s terror, as somewhere in a bramble-choked meadow, she stumbled uphill in the dark.
The rumble of iron wheels dispelled the odd current of witch thought. Mykkael dodged clear of the outbound slop wagon, sharpened by the awareness that the oldster on the driver’s box was not whistling. The captain moved on, pushing the halt in his leg, and testing the texture of Sessalie’s calm with an ear tuned and listening for change.
The mild night around him might have seemed ordinary, but for the wound pitch of a tension that sang underneath the ingrained habit of normalcy. Trade folk spoke in lowered voices on the street corners, their faces frowning and serious. Babies wailed from the lower town tenements, their cries muffled behind snugly barred shutters. Lovers stole kisses in the nooks between streetlamps, yet their embraces tonight seemed more frantic. If the tavern boys hung jaunty baskets of flowers above the doors of the taprooms, the talk at their backs held no ribald jokes, and no treble female laughter. Tin lanterns cast their circles of light, gilding the first shine of dew on the cobbles. Ahead of the mist, the air was dipped crystal, alive with the calls of a nightjar floating down from a rich merchant’s garden, and the knifing chill breathed off the ice fields above Howduin Gulch.
While time fleeted.
Arrived at the keep gate, Mykkael heard bullfrogs in the moat, sure sign the night’s crew of rag men were not out on their rounds netting salvage. Across town, the gist of the overheard gossip had wound to the same grim thread: Sessalie wore a deep-seated unease underneath her longstanding peace. People still tried to cling to complacency. They might shrug off fear with a smile of self-derision. False security blinded them. Amid the snug sanctuary of their mountains, the notion of deadly peril had been dismissed as unfounded fancy for too long.
Such innocence had no language to measure the magnitude of its helplessness. If Commander Taskin had ever once glimpsed the terrors these folk might suffer under usage by cold-struck sorcery, the iron courage of his commitment must surely falter, outfaced.
His face like cast stone, Mykkael greeted his alert sentries. Since, by his order, no torches burned by the watch post to spoil their night sight, he was spared their remark on the state of his back. Ahead, the plank bridge wore snags of mist risen off the black water below. Mykkael crossed the span, a scrape introduced to his stride by the knee overtaxed by the bell-tower steps. Yet tonight, far deeper concerns eclipsed the trials of his physical discomfort. The qualm in his gut as he stepped back on to stone paving served him the clear-cut warning: that he walked over ground wracked by the uncanny currents that moved where a sorcerer worked.
Mykkael approached the lighted bustle of the keep, pursued by haunted thoughts. He held no illusions, not now. His paper-thin tissue of peace had been torn since the moment he broached the locked coffer holding the Rathtet war’s artefacts. From Highgate, he carried the bone-deep awareness that his baiting ploy with Taskin’s crack archers had gone beyond brazen tactics. Each breath, he wrestled the stripped cry of his nerves. For King Isendon’s oath, and for a princess who pleaded with painted green eyes from a portrait, he wondered if he had the resilience left in him to withstand the challenge a second time.
Behind the balefire burn of Anja’s live fear, he still heard Orannia’s screaming. The fierce pain he had no power to remedy still bled him, a scalpel cut through the heart.
Two paces beyond the portcullis archway, the glow off the fire pans set him on display. Men trained to a hair-trigger edge of response took note of their captain’s entry. The white shirt hid nothing. Mykkael stepped across a lightning-struck silence, fast followed by thunderclap as the first, amazed whistle creased the stilled air at his back. The irritation all but unleashed his temper, that the guard had changed roster at sundown. Reliable, taciturn Cade was off watch. Which stroke of fouled timing launched Sergeant Jedrey to crowing satisfaction.
‘Insubordination, striking a crown lancer in the line of duty, insulting royal ambassadors, and oh, yes! While we’re at it, how many stripes decorate your dark hide for upstart insolence? How delightful to see Commander Taskin’s delivered the lashing you’ve richly deserved of your betters!’
‘Uncreative as all the rest of them,’ Mykkael agreed, his derision astonishingly amiable. He added, ‘Get me a task force of thirty men, soldier, armed and at the ready. I’m inside to the wardroom for a fast bite to eat. They’ll march on the moment I come out.’
Stalled in mid-diatribe by the brisk shift in subject, Jedrey lost words for rejoinder.
‘Duty!’ cracked Mykkael. ‘I’m calling a raid on a Falls Gate tavern, and you, dandy man, get to flash that spotless new surcoat at the forefront.’
‘Which tavern?’ asked Vensic, arrived for the bloodbath, and richly enjoying the flush that steamed Jedrey’s ears.
Mykkael smiled, all teeth. ‘The Bull Trough’s overdue for a mucking, I think. There’s still some stew left in the kettle inside? That’s good. To ream out that dive, a man doesn’t march without sustenance.’
Unlike the paved avenues in the upper-tier neighbourhoods, the warren of byways adjacent to Falls Gate were packed dirt, entangled and narrow as dropped string. Shopfronts battled for space to hang signs beneath the roof beams of the tenements, strung with their raggedy lines of hung laundry. No lamplighters visited these twisted, dimmed alleys, where starving rats scavenged the midden heaps. Citizens who braved the district at night brought candle lamps of wrought tin, or better, pine torches less apt to extinguish if dropped in the heat of a fracas.
The garrison’s task squad marched with oiled lint cressets, unlighted. Sessalie’s unbroken peace notwithstanding, Mykkael would have no man in the king’s falcon surcoat pose a target for covert assassins. The lesson had gone hardest, to teach men to walk quietly, with weapons and mail shirts damped silent.
For that reason, even the most furtive of whispers carried through, as the plan for the raid was mapped out.
‘Did you see, man, he leaned back in his chair, marked like that, and ate sausage as though nothing pained him.’
Mykkael snapped a finger
against the strap of his sword harness, which forced Jedrey to jump fast to still the loose chatter. Whether or not the sergeant regretted his impulse to select the most dissident names from the watch list, the garrison had been tuned for obedience. A war-hardened captain never slackened his discipline to insist a man under his charge had to like him.
‘Who wants to cover the bolt holes?’ Mykkael asked. His question cut through the barrage of coarse laughter that rolled from the packed taproom beyond the alley. ‘The Bull Trough has three.’
‘Three!’ exclaimed Jedrey, attentive at last to his duty. ‘Powers of daylight! Is that why you’ve never raided here?’
‘No.’ Mykkael’s answer showed tolerance. Under the faint shine of starlight, he glanced overhead and surveyed the row of gallery windows, curtained in lamplit, rose chintz. ‘The proprietor lies, cheats, waters his brew, even spices his cider with aphrodisiacs. But the madam who runs his upstairs brothel doesn’t prostitute children.’
Given the fifteen volunteers he required, the captain described the buildings whose cellars housed the escape routes. Jedrey reorganized the remaining men, some to seal off the doors and windows, with the coolest heads held in reserve for the frontal assault on the tavern.
‘We raiding for unpaid crown revenues, then?’ asked the bold man just forcefully silenced.
‘If you can pry out the proof there’s a deficit,’ Mykkael replied. A woman’s throaty chuckle drifted downwards, while the outline of a lissom body crossed the candlelit glow of a curtain. Beneath, the alley was poured pitch. If the captain’s form melted into the darkness, the stillness about him suggested the tension of a stalking lynx. ‘That’s your job, soldier.’ To Jedrey, he added, ‘Position your men quickly. Move them in the moment you hear the noise come back up in the taproom.’