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Two men snapped fists to their swords, for the insolence; the arrogant sergeant bit back another slur.
Taskin, rod straight, took the ribbing in his stride. ‘You serve under me, here above Highgate. Don’t forget that. Do you need a litter to reach your home turf? My groom can deliver the gelding.’
‘No litter, no groom.’ Caught with one leg thrust into his trousers, and his bad knee aching like vengeance, Mykkael unlocked the offended clench of his teeth. ‘And forgetting your style of service is right tough, you highhanded, pale-faced bastard.’
But his heated, last insult was respectfully masked, its phrasing couched in the intricate tongue spoken in Jussoud’s eastern steppes.
Two hours before dawn, the mist clung like wool, masking the snow-clad spires of the peaks that would restore her sense of direction. She huddled, shivering, in a pussywillow thicket, eyes shut to contain the fraught pitch of her fear, while patrols from the palace thundered past on the road, the smoke from their torches streaming…
IV. Victims (#udd66e510-c82c-5fc4-9823-260cbcf5eacc)
RETURNED TO THE PALACE ARMOURY, AND THE CANDLELIT ALCOVE THAT SERVED AS HIS TACTICAL HEADQUARTERS, TASKIN RESISTED THE URGE to run agitated fingers through his hair. Before him, spread flat, lay the list of merchants’ names and promises outlined in the seneschal’s fussy script. A second sheet, sent from the Highgate watch officer, detailed the traffic moving to and from the palace. Beyond the balcony, Taskin also commanded a view of the wardroom, below. At this hour, the chequered floor was crowded by the relief watch, donning surcoats and arms for the upcoming change of the guard.
A hovering aide raised a question over the jingle of mail. ‘Commander, you wanted the watch’s list sent on to the Lowergate garrison?’
‘To Captain Mysh kael, yes. No need to waste time for a copy’ Taskin selected the rice-paper sheet, which dutifully recorded his own dispatched messengers bearing the locked chest from the treasury, along with a wrapped oil painting; Mykkael himself, and his two-man escort; then disparate groups of Middlegate merchants with their wives, their grooms and their carriage teams. Each of those entries had been matched against the seneschal’s tally. The few names left over were accounted for: Crown Prince Kailen, off to visit the taverns by Falls Gate. The other contingent included a robed dignitary and six servants clad in Devall’s formal livery. They would be bound for the Lowergate keep, bearing the high prince’s offer of funding and men to further the search for the princess.
The gesture was a breach of crown protocol, and a slight against Sessalie’s aged king. Taskin assessed the move’s brazen overture, then measured its impact against the desert-bred captain he had just given high-handed dismissal. The upright seneschal would have flinched to imagine the course of the coming encounter. Devall’s smooth, lowland statesman might well fall prey to the brunt of Mykkael’s outraged temper. The ex-mercenary was seasoned. He had demonstrated his astute grasp of royal hierarchy. Even disadvantaged and set under pressure, he had handled his share of political byplay down to a subtle fine point.
Devall’s embassy was likely to suffer an unenviable reception down at the garrison. Not worried, his mouth almost turned by a smile, the commander slid the list across his marble-topped desk for dispatch through the messenger relay.
The aide left on that errand, and all but collided with an officer inbound through the alcove doorway. The arrival was early to be bearing word from the riders who quartered the riverbank. Taskin met the man’s urgent salute, braced for bad news and already up on his feet.
‘Report!’ he demanded.
The breathless newcomer wasted no words. ‘The palace drudge who discovered the sorcerer’s mark? We’ve found her. She’s dead.’
Taskin paused only to shout over the spooled rail of the gallery. ‘Captain Bennent! Get me a task squad. Now!’ To the winded officer, now forced to flank his commander’s clipped stride towards the stairwell, he added, ‘Take me there. I’ll hear your details on the move.’
The hollow report of the destriers’ hooves thundered over the planked drawbridge spanning the lower keep moat. To the rag men who netted for salvage on the bank, the noise posed a shattering break in routine. The Lowergate garrison were a division of foot. They used horses only for transport.
Not only the poor recognized the departure. As the breveted officer left in charge of the garrison, Vensic knew what his recent promotion was worth. By now made aware of the upset at the palace, he was at hand as the riders emerged through the dank swirl of fog at the gate.
The sultry glow from the bailey fire pans revealed them: two lancers leading in their immaculate palace surcoats, and a third man, cloaked and hooded, on a restive chestnut, whose slouched posture was not Mykkael’s.
Vensic surged forward. He caught the bridle of the ornery horse before one of his horseboys got mangled. ‘Where’s the captain?’ he demanded as the rider dismounted.
The palace guard escort startled, then stared at their charge, who flipped back the cloak’s cowled hood to expose the light-skinned, wry face of the Middlegate’s watch officer.
‘When the captain stopped to take reports and give orders, we changed places,’ the imposter confessed. His shrug as he slipped the cloak from his shoulders offered no grace of apology. ‘Mykkael’s habits force a man to stay keen. You’ll learn, if you’re here to serve under him.’
‘We’re Taskin’s, assigned to the messenger relay,’ one of the palace men rebutted. ‘Where’s your captain?’
‘Had business, an errand,’ said the officer, laconic. Then, to Vensic, ‘Mind that rogue’s ugly teeth. I’m told we’re to keep him. Remember the drover that Jedrey caught trying to pilfer the stores? Mykkael says that one’s appointed to tend him.’
Vensic laughed. ‘That’s just as likely to break his right hand as any formal sentencing.’
‘Won’t blight a man’s conscience, that way, Mykkael said,’ the gate officer explained in admiration. ‘Captain wished that hooved snake all the wicked joy of war. Hopes it can scare better sense into yon light-fingered misfit.’ Wary of the chestnut’s lightning-quick strike, he surrendered the reins, relieved to let the keep’s officer take charge, and muscle the brute through the bailey.
Vensic’s brisk shout pulled a man from the muster gathered to relieve the street watch. ‘Find a diligent boy who will keep the grooms clear,’ he instructed, then secured the surly chestnut to the hitching post with the sturdiest rope and shackle. ‘Someone from the armoury can have that pilferer brought up. Aye, the thieving little creep’s to meet his punishment.’
To the Middlegate officer still beside him, Vensic said, ‘Is the princess truly missing? Sorry prospect. What else did Mykkael give you?’
‘A right mouthful of orders.’ No smile, this time, as the Middlegate man assessed the yard’s milling industry, orange-lit by the cinders whirled off the fire pans. ‘First off, he wants you to double the street watch. No one’s pulled from patrol on the walls. Mykkael’s adamant, there. Draw a full reserve company, send them out straight away. I’ll tell you the rest when we’re settled inside.’
Vensic flagged the outbound sergeant, then belatedly noted the palace guards, who still trailed astride, looking miffed. ‘Why not get down? Come into the wardroom and breakfast on cider and sausage. Captain Mykkael will be back on his own, before long. Slip in when nobody’s looking, if he can, just to test if the men keep sharp watch.’
‘Slinks like a desert cur,’ agreed the guardsman on the grey, handing his mount off to a horseboy.
Vensic looked back at him, sober. ‘He can, when it suits him. But be careful how you say so. Our garrison has a healthy measure of respect for the captain’s outlandish habits.’
Mykkael, at that moment, was outside the town wall, standing knee-high in drenched grasses. The velvet shadow of spring nightfall masked him, heavy with mist, and the stench wafted up from the tannery. First overt sign of his presence, his sharp movement silenced the shrilling of peepers. The hurled flake of granite left his opened hand, sailed up in an evil and accurate trajectory, and cracked into a latched wooden shutter.
A painted slat splintered. The clatter of fragments wakened the dogs, kennelled in barrels behind him, and launched them into a frenzy. Chains dragged. The night quiet shattered to a chorus of barking.
Mykkael smiled, and waited. A moment later, the shutter slammed back and disgorged the irate face of a matron. If her hair was tied up in curling rags, her tongue was not bound. Keen as a troutman’s flensing knife, her curses shrilled over the racketing hounds.
Mykkael winced. Since the misty darkness no doubt obscured the falcon device on his surcoat, he half-turned, resigned, and uttered the yip the steppes nomads used to round up their wandering stock. The barbaric cry transformed the dogs’ snarling into yaps of riotous welcome.
‘Fortune’s pink, naked arse, it’s yourself!’ huffed the matron. The damaged shutter clapped shut.
Shortly, the downstairs door cracked, and a towheaded child admitted him. Mykkael ruffled her hair, then stepped into gloom redolent with wet hound, and the rancid aroma of ham and boiled onions. He said gently, ‘I’m sorry. Tonight, I haven’t brought butcher’s scraps.’
The upstairs voice shouted down and upbraided him. ‘You’ll pay for that burst shutter in coin, if the silver comes out of your pay share.’
Then the house matron shuffled down the beam stairway, mantled in mismatched wool blankets. The feet under her night robe were callused and bare, with the lumps of the curling rags hastily stuffed under a drawstring cap. Worse than mortified, she appeared outraged enough to snatch up a game knife and geld the importunate male who had rousted her.
Well warned as the spill of her pricket candle unveiled her purpled complexion, Mykkael spoke quickly. ‘Crown business, madam. Your husband is needed.’
‘Well, your murderer’s bound to evade the law, this time. Benj is no use.’ The woman plonked her broad rump on the settle, while the dutiful girl shoved the door closed. To Mykkael’s raised eyebrows, the matron admitted, ‘He’s drunk. Flopped in a heap in the smokehouse, with my oldest son snoring off whisky beside him. They sipped their fill off the crown’s largesse. Neither one’s likely to budge before noontide, when they’re finally driven to piss. They’ll loll about with sore heads, after that. Take brawn and a handcart to shift them an inch, and not worth the thumping bother.’
‘Where’s the handcart?’ Mykkael inquired, dead earnest.
The huntsman’s raw-boned, vociferous wife stared back at him, gaping.
‘Madam, tonight my quarry’s no murdering felon. Her Grace Princess Anja is missing. I want the riverbanks quartered, but quietly. Taskin has three squads of outriders searching, crown guards, sent from the palace. They have city-bred eyes, and might see what’s obvious, but for nuance, I need a trapper. Nobody other than Benj has the huntsman’s knowledge to track her.’ The pricket flame flared. Light brushed the cut angles of Mykkael’s set face, then subsided, cloaking him back under shadow. ‘I’ll heave your man into the moat if I must, to shake him out of his stupor.’
‘Benj’ll waken, if it’s for the princess.’ The goodwife adjusted her blankets and stood, too canny to test Mykkael’s barbaric temperament, or stall him with badgering questions. ‘Or else, as I’m born, I’ll help douse the layabout under myself.’
She shooed her girl off at a run to haul the handcart out of the shed. ‘We’ll just strap my man into a dog harness, first. Benj, bless his heart, doesn’t swim.’
The adrenaline prickle of raised hair at the nape was not a sensation Commander Taskin experienced often, although hazard had visited many a time through his diligent years of crown service. A poisoning attempt, or an assassin set on the run through the dark might unleash such a primal reaction. Taskin preferred the controlled clarity of sharp wits, applied with objective reason.
Yet the death that had followed Princess Anja’s disappearance roughened his skin with untoward nerves as he pushed open the door to the drudge’s cellar apartment.
The air inside smelled of hot grease and death, musty with closed-in dust. Straight as iron, Taskin peered into gloom scarcely cut by the flare of a tallow dip.
‘Commander? She’s here.’ A striker snapped, setting flame to a second wick in an alcove off to one side.
Taskin crossed over the threshold. He almost tripped as his boot heel mired in a throw rug braided from rags. That ill grace nettled him worse than the exhaustion brought on by a night of extended duty. He pushed past a curtain of strung wooden beads, and at last encountered his duty sergeant.
The man knelt by a box bed tucked into the wall. Taskin stooped under the lintel and squeezed his tall frame into the stifling, close quarters.
The old woman lay straight as a board on stained sheets. Her eyes were wide open, as though the horror that had pinched out her life still lurked in the airless dark.
‘Not a mark on her,’ the sergeant said, his voice pitched taut with unease. ‘Her extremities are cold and she’s started to stiffen.’ He pressed a palm over his nose and mouth to stifle the taint as he added, ‘You know the men claim she was taken by sorcery? They’ve noted the desert-bred captain was the last to be seen in her living company’
Taskin regarded those frozen eyes, gleaming like glass in the flame light. Again, gooseflesh puckered the skin on his arms. ‘They think Mysh kael did this?’
The sergeant shrugged. ‘Well, our northern stock doesn’t breed the rogue talent for witchery.’
‘We have other foreigners inside our walls,’ Taskin pointed out with acerbity.
‘True enough.’ The sergeant rubbed his bracers as though to shake off a chill. ‘But we have only one of them born to bronze skin.’
Taskin rebuffed that statement with silence. He bent, sniffed at the dead woman’s mouth, then resumed his unflinching inspection. Methodical, he pursued the unsavoury task, undeterred by the stink, or the whisper of draught that set the bead curtain clacking, and winnowed the glow of the unshielded candle.
The sergeant stared elsewhere, transparently anxious. ‘What do you want done with the corpse? She has no close family; we already checked.’
Finished examining the dead woman’s arms for a pox rash or signs of a puncture, Taskin gave his considered answer. ‘Roust the palace steward. Tell him I want the use of a wash tub to pack the body in snow. Then fetch the king’s physician. I’d have his opinion concerning this death, though the cause would seem to be poison.’
‘Who would wish her harm?’ The sergeant raised the candle, cast its wavering light over the poor woman’s ramshackle furnishings. Her work-worn mantle draped, forlorn, on its peg, alongside two raggedy skirts. ‘What did this drudge have that would merit an assassin who carried exotic potions?’
‘If she knew anything about the princess’s clothes, somebody wanted her silenced.’ Taskin straightened, and wiped his long fingers on the corner of the fusty sheet. The glance he delivered along with his summary was stern as forge-hammered steel. ‘If you overhear anyone else passing gossip, I want the talk stopped. No man mentions sorcery unless we have proof. The same rule applies to the matter of Captain Mysh kael’s integrity.’
Mykkael returned to the garrison wardroom in the black hour prior to dawn, but not with his usual style of cat-footed anonymity. His errand had left him soaked to the waist. No matter how silent, his presence brought in the miasma of green algae and raw effluent from the stockyards.
Sergeant Cade met him, broad-shouldered and dependable, his gruff face drawn with concern. ‘Bright powers, where were you?’ His wry survey took in Mykkael’s pungent state, and prompted a struck note of horror. ‘Don’t tell me you just dragged the Lowergate moat for somebody’s unlucky corpse?’
‘I was actually dousing a limp body under,’ Mykkael admitted without humour. He pressed ahead by brute will, his exhausted leg dragging, and his voice raised over the screeling wail as the garrison’s armourer refurbished a blade on the sharpening wheel. ‘Is Jedrey down from the Middlegate, and where’s Stennis? You did get my word, that I wanted the reserve roster called up for active duty?’
‘Day watch is already dispatched, with reserves. Jedrey’s back.’ Cade gestured towards a pile of loose slates, jostled aside on a trestle. ‘Assignments are listed for your review. You want them brought upstairs? Very well. I sent Stennis to head the patrol at the Falls Gate. The mad seeress you wanted to question wasn’t asleep in her bed. Since her family couldn’t say where she went, I presumed you’d want a search mounted, soonest.’
Mykkael gave the officer’s choice his approval, then added, ‘Not like the old besom, to wander at night.’
‘Well, you have an immediate problem, right here,’ Cade said, a nettled hand raised to shelter his nose from the stench brought in with his captain.
Mykkael stopped. He regarded his most stalwart sergeant’s dismay with a dawning spark of grim interest. ‘You’re suggesting I might change my clothing?’
Sergeant Cade gave way and threw up his hands, harried at last to despair. ‘You won’t get the chance. Devall’s heir apparent sent an accredited delegate with five servants here to receive you. They’ve been cooling their heels with bad grace for an hour. Since the wardroom’s too noisy to keep them in comfort, we put them upstairs in your quarters.’
The effort of dragging his game knee upstairs, weighed down by waterlogged boots, destroyed the lingering, last bit of relief bestowed by Jussoud’s expert hands. Mykkael reached the landing, streaming fresh sweat. As his hip socket seized with a shot bolt of agony, he stopped and braced a saving hand against the stone wall by the door jamb. There, wrapped in shadow, reliant on stillness to ease his stressed leg, he all but gagged on the wafted scent of exotic floral perfume. The fragrance overpowered even his soiled clothes. Mykkael’s first response, to indulge in ripe language, stayed locked behind his shut teeth. Cat-quiet, not smiling, he took pause instead, and measured the extent of his violated privacy.
Devall’s servants had disdained to use the clay lamp from his field kit. Accustomed to refinements and lowland wealth, and no doubt put off by fish oil, they had lit the garrison’s hoarded store of precious beeswax candles. The chest just ransacked to find them was shut, the lid occupied by a liveried adolescent, who buffed his fingernails with the snakeroot cloth Mykkael saved for polishing brass. More effete servants perched on his pallet. The largest pair had appropriated his pillows for backrests. Another one snored on the folded camp blanket, his pudgy hands clasped on his belly. The last rested boots fine enough for a lordling on Mykkael’s straw-stuffed hassock, uncaring whether the bronze caps on his heels might scratch the painted leather.
The captain might ignore those self-absorbed oversights. But not the barebones necessity, that the high stool by the trestle he required to relieve his scarred knee was currently unavailable. The Prince of Devall’s accredited envoy sat there, an older man with the arrogant ease ingrained by born privilege and crown office. His back was turned. The furred hem of a costly, embroidered robe lapped at his neatly tucked ankles, and his barbered head tilted with the air of a man absorbed by illicit reading.
The pain hounded Mykkael to a split-second choice, and efficiency overrode nicety. He drew his sword.
The grating slide of steel leaving scabbard whipped the dignitary to his feet. His raw leap of startlement whirled him around as the captain limped into the room, then sent him in stumbling retreat from a weapon point dulled by hard use.
Each dent, each scratch, each pit etched by weather lay exposed in the flare of the candles.
The servant on the stores chest gave a shrill squeak and dropped the polishing cloth in his lap.
‘Not to worry.’ Mykkael flashed his teeth, not a smile, snapped the cloth off the boy’s trembling knee, then hooked his vacated stool just in time. Since his last, staggered stride towards collapse would be seen as a loutish breach of diplomacy, he turned the effect to advantage. ‘This is a northern-forged longsword, as you see. Not a shaman’s weapon, that must be appeased by the taste of living flesh when it’s bared. I’ve only drawn it for cleaning, besides.’
While the High Prince’s delegation eyed his bared blade with incensed apprehension, Mykkael met and searched six flinching glances one after the next, without quarter. ‘Relax. Ordinary steel means nobody bleeds.’
As the dignitary smoothed down his ruffled clothes, and the servants nursed their shocked nerves, the garrison captain granted them space. He looked down, let them stare as they pleased while he scrounged after his oil jar. The interval confirmed his suspicion that his papers had been disarranged. So had his quill pens, the keep’s books, the ground pigments for inks, and his boxes of spare fletching and broadheads. Every belonging he kept on the trestle had been callously fingered and moved.
In deflected pique, Mykkael dipped the cloth and began to attack the rust on his weapon. The white snakeroot fibres quickly turned colour. To the untutored eye, the stains would appear indistinguishable from dried blood.
Soon enough, he was gratified by excitable whispers behind the servants’ cupped hands. While the dignitary dared a mincing step forward and floundered to salvage diplomacy, Mykkael scarcely regretted the uproar aroused by his ornery leg. Dog-tired, in itching need of a bath, he allowed his ill humour to ride him. ‘Since you didn’t come down from the Highgate for tea, what can the garrison do for you?’
Gold chains flashed as the foreigner peered down his cosseted nose. Mykkael captured the moment, as the watery, pale eyes flickered over his person, and dismissed him. The man’s shaved, lowland features showed his transparent thought: that Devall’s greater majesty owed no grace of respect to desert-bred stock, bound by poor fortune to accept the paid service of an isolate mountain kingdom. Devall’s suave overture would be dutifully delivered, though every word would ring hollow.
‘His Highness, for whom I stand as crown advocate, wished to offer his assistance with the search to find Princess Anja. Armed men can be spared from his personal retinue, and gold, as need be, to loosen those tongues you might find reluctant to talk.’
Mykkael raised his eyebrows, his attention apparently fixed on his work with the sword. ‘They’d crawl through the sewers at my command?’
The advocate stiffened.
The movement snapped Mykkael’s head up. His brown eyes shone like hammered bronze in the excessive flood of the candlelight. ‘Ah, there, don’t take affront. Gold braid and velvet won’t suit, I do realize. Why not offer Devall’s guardsmen to Taskin?’
Unfazed by the servants’ skewering regard, Mykkael watched, unblinking, while a man who was not thinking civilized words maintained his mask of state dignity. ‘Commander Taskin has been offered assistance as well. In his Highness’s name, I can say that gold braid and velvet are of trifling concern beside the royal bride’s safety.’
‘I agree.’ Mykkael raised his sword, and swung towards the nearest candle to sight down the business edge. He set down the rag, then recovered the whetstone he also used as a paperweight. ‘Tell your prince his generosity has my heartfelt thanks. If Sessalie’s garrison requires his assistance, his men, or his bullion, I will inform him by way of Commander Taskin.’
Devall’s envoy pursed sour lips. ‘You don’t care for her Grace’s security, outsider?’
Mykkael took his time, primed the whetstone with oil, then ran it in a ringing hard stroke down the length of his blade. ‘King Isendon, her father, cares very much. I work in his name.’ Another stroke; the battered weapon’s exceptional temper sang aloud with ungentle warning. ‘Better that his Highness of Devall should be reminded not to forget that.’
‘You were a mercenary, before this,’ the delegate observed in contempt.
‘Proud of it,’ Mykkael agreed, reasonable. Proud enough to know, in Sessalie’s case, that the keys to a kingdom were not in his purview to sell. ‘Are you done here?’
‘Apparently so.’ The royal advocate snapped irritable fingers and rousted his bevy of servants. The industrious one elbowed his fellow awake. The others rose, yawning and scattering the pillows. As his indolent retinue assembled about him, the dignitary bestowed a crisp bow, then gathered his robes and swept out. The ruffle of air stirred up by his exit streamed the candles, and wafted the sickly sweet odour of hyacinth.
Mykkael swore under his breath with brisk feeling. Then he braced his left hand on the trestle and pushed himself back to his feet. He was still snuffing candles when Vensic arrived, bearing a flat item wrapped in a quilt.
‘Come in, the door’s open,’ Mykkael snapped, resigned.
‘Breached, more like.’ The good-natured officer of the keep cat-footed inside, sniffed once, then grinned in farm-bred appreciation over the melange of bog reek and perfume. ‘You asked for something from the palace?’
Mykkael turned his head, saw the package brought up from the wardroom, then nodded. ‘A portrait. Her Grace’s likeness, don’t handle it carelessly’
Vensic noted the scattered sheets on the trestle, frowned, then settled for propping his burden on top of the rumpled pallet. ‘I see now why that dignitary left looking singed.’
