Talquist shuddered inwardly, but betrayed no emotion. The Diviner was referring to the ancient instrumentality that stood in the square outside the palace, its immense size casting an enormous shadow over the land, a giant set of weighing scales with plates large enough to each hold an oxcart. The Scales were considered the arbiter of all things of consequence, the decider of questions of great importance, as they had been brought with the Cymrian refugees a millennia and half ago from the old world, and had been imbued with the wisdom of that land. Any time a throne was left empty, or a dispute over territory or the need to go to war was felt, the Scales had weighed the possibilities and rendered a decision that was considered indisputable and final. It had shown wisdom and unbiased objectivity in all its renderings.
Until, of course, Talquist had found a way to rig the weighing of the candidates for the open throne of the empire of Sorbold.
A throne he had made open by killing both the empress and the Crown Prince himself.
“We will see what we can come up with,” he said nonchalantly. “There is no need to concern yourself with it tonight, Hjorst. Let Kryst show you to your room, good sleep and pleasant dreams to you after your long journey. Thank you for coming all this way for my investiture. I tell you sincerely, this special time for me would not have been the same without you being here to share it with me, my friend.”
The Diviner nodded wearily and followed the servant down the Great Stair. Talquist watched him descend, then sat back down in his chair, refilled his glass, and held it up to the firelight. The goblet caught the light of the flames again, this time causing a warm red glow like a mask on his eyes.
He smiled, amused at his last words to the Diviner.
They were the only truthful thing he had said all night.
He cast a glance over at the statue of the titanic soldier. Though its eyes remained colorless, Talquist was quite certain he could ascertain a slight smile on its stone lips as well.
8
Once the Diviner and the king of Golgarn had gone to bed, Talquist sent for another guest.
The soon-to-be emperor was drowsing in front of the fire, his glass almost empty, when a respectful tap came at the door of the library, a smaller, more private room than the massive hall where he had supped with the two monarchs.
“Come,” he said pleasantly.
The door opened silently, and a thin man with similarly thin, long hair entered the room even more silently. His face was hollow, with a hooked nose between two eyes of devouring darkness. He was attired in far grander couture than he had been the last time Talquist had seen him, when he and his subordinate from the Raven’s Guild had come in their ratty cloaks and dark, unremarkable clothing, looking to parley in the even rattier, darker business of assassin’s guilds.
Now he was indistinguishable from any of the other guests of state that were being housed in Jierna Tal for the grand occasion of Talquist’s Weighing on the Scales and subsequent coronation the next day.
“Well, good evening, Dranth,” Talquist said. He drained his glass, then rose, went to the decanter, passing the enormous statue of a soldier that filled the corner of the study, and filled his glass again.
“And to you, m’lord,” the thin man answered, bowing slightly. “Felicitations and congratulations on your ascent tomorrow.”
“Thank you.” Talquist sat back down. He had not offered the man anything to drink. “I trust all is well in Yarim.”
Dranth nodded, still standing in the place he stopped when he came in.
“I am delighted with your work in Golgarn,” Talquist said. “The documents you planted were convincing enough for Beliac to happily surrender a good two-thirds of his fleet; he put every warship I asked for at my disposal.”
Dranth smiled slightly. “I think that might have more to do with the false camp of, er, Bolg that was set up in the foothills just outside the capital. Inspired, to be able to convince a man with an extraordinary reputation for scholarship that monsters who haven’t moved closer than five hundred miles to his kingdom for the last six hundred years are lurking five miles outside his castle door. Sheer artistry, Majesty.”
“We make a good team,” the emperor-to-be acknowledged. “Speaking of teams, are you still working in concert with the Spider’s Clutch of Golgarn?”
“Yes, Majesty. We are awaiting your orders.”
“Delightful. Then let me show you the next assignment I would like you to undertake.”
Talquist turned to the large stone titan in the corner of the room and nodded.
The irises in the statue’s eyes went from inanimate stone to a piercing blue. Its muscles flexed; then it walked slowly over to the Emperor Presumptive.
Dranth’s eyebrows rose slightly, but otherwise his face was impassive.
“Faron,” Talquist said, humor in his voice, “meet Dranth. He is the guild scion of the Raven’s Guild in Yarim Paar.” The titan stared at the assassin with its milky blue eyes, disconcertingly out of place in the otherwise-stone face.
“It was my understanding when you came here last time that you have sworn a blood oath of vengeance against Achmed of Ylorc, king of the Firbolg,” said Talquist. “Is that still the case?”
“A blood oath, by its very nature, is eternal, Majesty,” Dranth answered dryly. “So therefore, since, for the moment, the Bolg king lives, yes.”
“And are you willing to undertake, with your fellows in both the Raven’s Guild and the Spider’s Clutch of Golgarn, an assassination within the Firbolg mountains?”
Dranth exhaled, though no part of his body moved.
“In our hearts, with utter certainty. But our minds are aware that the mountains are all but unassailable. Esten, our guildmistress in Yarim, sent back schematics and drawings of the fortifications of the mountains, along with schedules of troop movements and details of the traps they employ. Even knowing this information, we have been unable to find even the smallest hole in the shield, the tiniest opening to slip through.” His voice faltered; the Emperor Presumptive knew it was because after the guildmistress had send back those schematics and drawings, the Bolg had sent back her rotting head in a crate.
Talquist smiled broadly. “What if I could show you a map to such an opening?”
“That would be most interesting.”
The Emperor Presumptive’s smile waned. “Interesting enough to expand your blood oath to include his associates and fellow Cymrians?”
Dranth raised an eyebrow.
“I am willing to show you a way into Canrif,” said Talquist, “but in return, I want you to make it a policy to remove any Cymrians in positions of power, there or elsewhere across the Alliance, from those positions. And, when you are in Canrif, I want you to specifically search for a child, possibly the child of the Lord and Lady Cymrian. I suspect this child and its mother are hiding there, though I have no proof of that.”
“Show me the way in, and I will kill whoever you like,” said Dranth.
“Ah, ah—I do not want the child on that list. This is of critical importance. I do not know if it is in fact an infant, or weaned, but if it is as young as I suspect it is—I have reason to believe it was born three months ago, at Yule—it may still be a nursing infant, which would mean you would need to keep the mother alive as well, at least until you deliver the baby to me.”
“We do not specialize in delivering anything live, Majesty. But I am willing to undertake what you ask if you really have a map of an entrance. Esten never found such a doorway.”
“But I, Dranth, I will. I will show you exactly where you can enter the Firbolg kingdom, the precise doorway—in return for but one hair from your head.”
Dranth swallowed. He was well aware of the import of the request; the possession of someone’s hair, even a single strand of it, made it possible for that person to be tracked anywhere the wind could reach. The Raven’s Guild made extensive use of such things when pursuing a victim. To agree to such a thing was a tremendous personal risk.
&nbs
p; But to refuse might mean the condemnation of his blood oath to failure.
A far worse fate.
“Done,” he said.
Talquist approached the guild scion and took hold of a strand of his thin hair. He plucked it from the man’s head, evoking no reaction from Dranth. Satisfied, he looked at the titan.
The statue stared at Dranth a moment longer.
Then it opened its massive hand.
In its palm was an oblong, irregular object, gray in color, thin with a finely tattered edge, like a giant fish scale. The statue turned its palm at a slight angle, and a flash of blue light skittered across the object’s surface.
“Come and look at the scale, Dranth,” Talquist said softly, almost reverently.
The guild scion came close enough to see the object in the statue’s hand, near enough to hear it breathe. He looked down at the dull gray surface, finely scored with tiny lines that made it look like it came from the hide of a snake.
Then, before his eyes, he watched the scale turn translucent.
It seemed as if there was a tiny image on its surface. Dranth looked closer.
At first what he could make out looked like the primitive picture of an eye with clouds surrounding it, but unobscured by them. Then, as he stared at the scale, the picture seemed to clear and resolve into one of an almost endless range of mountains, layer upon layer of fanglike peaks rising to a sky as blue as the light that had danced across the scale’s surface. A moving image of the sun rose slowly in the east, providing a directional reference.
Then the picture seemed to home in on a particular place within the peaks. It was a small internal canyon nestled deep within the mountains, with rock walls that rose up in a tall circle, leading down into a dark hole where the rocky ground should have been.
As if his eyes had wings, the image moved, following the perspective of the filmy picture as it dove downward past the walls of the round interior canyon to a small, grassy field at its bottom. The rockwalls that he had seen from above now seemed to tower over the field, as if to indicate that the canyon was deep underground and hidden within the peaks.
After a moment, the translucent image shifted, and once again moved. Dranth’s eyes followed it as it sped to the edge of the canyon’s field to the south, ending at the shore of a dark, underground lake, a lake within a massive cave with a high vault of stone above it. The image sped across the lake, past an island at its center that had the remains of a gazebo at its far edge surrounded by nothing but rubble where a small house, trees, and extensive gardens had all been reduced to ash.
Dranth, who had no idea what he was seeing, watched woozily as the image sped across the other side of the lake to a shore that led up to an underground passageway, finally opening into the light of a much larger but very much similar canyon, this one also a circle with high, towering walls, its field above the ground riven by an enormous hole in the center.
The walls that rimmed it reached up to the open sky above.
The tiny image continued to move, heading to the tall circular wall, a seemingly unbroken stand of rock, until it came to a hallway of a sort hidden by the bends and crevasses in the canyon wall. Dranth watched as it sped down the hallway in the rock, the sides of the small pass reaching up on either side of it, until it finally opened into a heath that overlooked a colossal city, carved from the very face of the mountains themselves.
Hirsute, demi-human soldiers in studded leather armor were patrolling the mountain passes around the city.
Dhranth blinked.
Canrif.
He had seen inside Canrif itself, in detail.
As if on a spool of filmy thread, the image rewound itself, speeding back down the hidden hallway, into the wide-open canyon with the broken meadow, back to the passage that led to the underground grotto, across the dark subterranean lake, over the desolate ruins on the island in the center, across the other side of the lake to the tiny tunnel that led to the smaller, underground canyon, up into the sky that opened into a seemingly endless range of fanglike mountain peaks.
The image faded and disappeared, leaving the scale in the titan’s hands blank and gray again.
“This, I believe, is the only unguarded entrance to Canrif,” the Emperor Presumptive said. “From the maps that Esten sent you, and what you have just seen, can you determine how to get inside?”
“Absolutely.” Dranth’s almost skeletal face stretched into the first true smile Talquist had seen since the guild scion had entered the room.
“Good. Now, let us be clear in our understanding, as I always try to do in business. I have shown you not only the way into Canrif, but the scrying instrument I use to look into distant places which are often otherwise hidden from my sight. I want you to forget that you have seen this instrument, Dranth, to let it utterly disappear from your head, leaving the image it showed you remaining there. If you ever reveal its existence, if I ever hear of it on the wind, it would have been better if your own head had been placed in the box along with that of your mistress that the Bolg delivered to you after discovering who she was, and that she was inside their mountain. I assume I don’t have to explain to you what you have given me in collateral for this information?”
“Of course not, Majesty,” Dranth said darkly.
“Excellent. I just wanted to be sure. The Dynasty of the Dark Earth is gone, crumbled to dust with the death of the Empress Leitha last year. Tomorrow I will ascend to the new dynastic throne to undertake the beginning of the Empire of the Sun and, like its namesake, it will be a shining era. I certainly hope our long-standing friendship and business relationship will dissuade either side from betraying the other. There is so much potential for everyone to prosper greatly, to make old enemies suffer, and to gain the power that we, whose ancestors ruled these lands long before the Cymrians arrived, should have had all along.”
“Agreed,” said Dranth.
“Good. When will you and your company leave for Canrif?”
“Tomorrow, after your Weighing and coronation.”
“Perfect. Send word to me when you have accomplished your task. And be careful of the child, should you find it—if it is less than a year in age, bring its mother along as well. Do not defile her until I have determined whether she is nursing or not.”
“Of course not.” Dranth’s eyes darkened in displeasure at the affront.
“Please do not take offense, Dranth. If, as I surmise, the child’s mother is the Lady Cymrian, you will have quite a fight on your hands. Her husband destroyed an entire corhort of my soldiers single-handedly that had come in disguise to Haguefort, I’m told. She is said to be formidable in her own right, and beautiful enough to melt even your granite heart.”
“I have no heart, Majesty. The only thing that beats within my chest is the rage that feeds my blood oath.”
“Indeed, but you still have eyes, and a tarse between your legs, I assume. You may need to employ a paralytic to incapacitate her; she will doubtless fight like a demon to protect her child.”
“I am ready.”
Talquist nodded. “Now, if you will excuse me, I need to retire for the night. Tomorrow is destined to be a great day, but most such days begin early. Good night.”
Dranth bowed, his wraithlike body as straight as an arrow, then took his leave of the library.
The eyes of the massive statue focused on his back, boring holes in it that he could feel even after he closed the door behind him.
9
HIGHMEADOW, ROLAND
No matter how many glasses of Canderian brandy he poured down his gullet, the pain in Tristan Steward’s ribs would not recede. His lungs were clear enough to breathe in the smoky air of the library to which he had fled a few hours earlier, but each breath was labored, causing his sides to hurt with the effort of taking in air. With a bitter hiss of liquid through clenched teeth, he bolted back another snifter’s contents and closed his blue eyes, then ran his fingers meaninglessly through his sweat-soaked auburn hair, hot and brittl
e from sitting endlessly before the library’s roaring hearth.
Steward, the Lord Roland and prince of Bethany, was trying and failing to blot from his mind the vision of the Lord Cymrian returning to the main keep of Highmeadow in the early light of foredawn, carrying in his arms the body of a woman Tristan knew well.
Perhaps not well, he thought, reconsidering the moment. But certainly intimately.
From the moment she had come to his notice in his own keep in the province of Bethany, the dead chambermaid, whose name was Portia, had become impossible for him to resist. Dark of hair and fair of face, with a wicked sparkle in her large, doe-like eyes, she had displayed none of the respectful deference that was universally present in those of the serving class, except when she was in public. In the privacy of his bedchamber, to which she had almost immediately gravitated, she was insolent and playful, commanding and dominating him sexually in a manner that he was both loath to allow and gleeful to embrace. Her ruthless passion had captivated him in ways that no other bed partner had ever inspired, and her willingness to participate without hesitation or compunction in whatever nefarious scheme he felt like concocting had made him trust her more than any person he had ever confided in save one.
It appalled him to know that other trusted person had met a similar fate to the one that had apparently befallen Portia.
But to recognize his own hand in the demise of his favorite paramours, both of whom he had sent forth on similarly shameful missions where they had met their hideous ends, would have required a modicum of introspection from Tristan Steward, as well as the ability to feel guilt and responsibility for his actions. Both of these traits had only been his while his first paramour, a serving woman named Prudence, was alive, and only because she had taken on the role of his conscience, loving him and insisting that he be a better man than he was by natural inclination. Any desire for self-improvement, for ethics and higher purpose had fled along with her spirit as it left the world. Now Tristan was alone again, aching with grief but feeling little remorse and no guilt whatsoever.