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 officer 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.’
‘You won’t be with us?’ the sergeant asked, startled.
Mykkael turned his head. Not smiling, with teeth or otherwise, he said, ‘There’s a man inside I wish to interview. You’ll raid the bar and keep a lid on the bolt holes, while I bag my game in the brothel.’
‘You’re climbing in by way of the wall?’ someone broke out, incredulous.
‘What in the reaper’s thousand hells for?’ Eyebrows raised, Mykkael laughed outright. ‘Easier, surely, to use the front door and go in as a paying customer.’ Before Jedrey’s look of poleaxed astonishment, he said plainly, ‘Why else keep the splendour of my spoiled shirt, if not to wring a martyr’s applause from the riff-raff? On my chosen signal, Sergeant. Have the men ready’
Mykkael strode off, the hitch of his worsening limp masked under the alley’s clogged darkness. The men left in place by the windows, and the strike force poised under Jedrey watched their captain take pause only once, his sharp, desert profile outlined in the light that spilled from the Bull Trough’s taproom. That split second gave him the bearings he needed. A man on a mission far removed from the lusty pleasure of dalliance, Mykkael tugged his snagged shirt from the grip of a scab, resettled his sheathed sword, and strode in.
The smell and the noise assaulted the senses in an overpowering blast: the fat reek of tallow like warm glue, binding the miasma of heated bodies, spilled beer, yelling voices and shrieked laughter, underlaid by the pitch tang of sawdust. The wolf pack seethe of roistering patrons wore drab motley and homespun, or the worn leather aprons of craftsmen. Seated on benches, or leaned in fierce argument across the rough trestles, they spoke the tough dialect of woodcutters and drovers, and wore the sweat-shiny muscles of smiths. Dice throwers rubbed elbows with shirtless men, arm wrestling, while wagers were counted, and cheeky barmaids swayed through the press with trays laden with foaming beer steins.
Until Mykkael’s entry provoked a sharp recoil. Sight of his features cast a hush as dense as a thrown blanket. The heave of boisterous movement stalled. Pale faces turned, flushed red with stunned recognition. Here, his dark skin framed a shout that spoke louder than the crown’s falcon surcoat, or his vested authority as captain of Lowergate’s garrison.
One too many of tonight’s rabid gamblers had lost a year’s coin to the upset at last summer’s tourney. Nor had the insult subsided without strain. The changes flushed through the stews by the Falls Gate by Mykkael’s worldly experience had curbed the freebooting licence left ingrained by decades of slipshod enforcement. His steel-clad patrols redressed those inequities, which kept the smouldering sparks of old rancour well fanned.
‘Well, well! Look what an ill wind just blew in off the streets,’ ventured a heckler towards the rear. A man at one of the front trestles spat, while, staring challenge at Mykkael, a blowsy seamstress pushed the stained hands of a dyer’s boy into her gaping blouse. His surrounding friends hooted, applauding with drunken encouragement. Once past the shock of Mykkael’s entry, the Bull’s patrons realized they were a multitude, pitched against one.
Sparks ripe for dry tinder, they were primed to react.
Mykkael’s strategic review had assured that the horse thief he sought was not in the crush on the benches. Met on all sides by aggressive hostility, he broke into full-throated laughter. ‘Are you pigeons starving for cheap entertainment? Never saw any lot stare like green boys at a man who walks in to scratch the ripe itch.’ He reached out, snake-fast. While near bystanders flinched, his tossed coin rang on to a serving girl’s tray. His follow-through snagged a filled tankard. Mykkael sampled the brew. Eyes shut in a grimace of striking contempt, he returned the vessel in nearly unbroken motion. ‘The whores better have nicer kick than the brew, here. Which skirt’s got steaming magma beneath? Only one, I hear tell, is worth asking for.’
‘And which one’s that, mongrel?’ a roisterer shouted. ‘For you, she may not be in heat.’
But Mykkael had well hooked their male curiosity. He swaggered towards the railed gallery, where the establishment’s ringleted madam set her nubile collection on display.
Taskin’s left signature could not escape notice. ‘Looks like you been whipped out of one bed already,’ a doxy remarked from the sidelines.
‘Just frisky, first round,’ Mykkael disagreed. His tigerish smile went and resurged as his dark eyes roved over the mountainous form of the madam. Admiring her roped pearls and pillowed, pink bosom, he leaned over the railing, kissed her rouged cheek, then chided before she could speak. ‘Ah, mother, relax. The hard edge is sawn off. I’m nice for the women, tonight.’
The burst of coarse laughter shook dust from the ceiling beams. Limp notwithstanding, Mykkael disdained the stair and staged a fluid vault on to the platform. The onlookers were presented with his insolent back as he inspected the live goods, half naked and simpering as they flashed sheer lace petticoats, and preened in their ruffles and glass beads.
A few baited their prowess with cutting enthusiasm, the boldest ones fingering his soiled shirt, or jostling his stance with swayed hips.
‘I’ll cure that limp, soldier.’
‘You walking three-legged, boy? C’mon. Let me ride you.’
‘Let’s see how long I take to melt your hard muscles to jelly’
A coy redhead tucked a spray of daisies through the strap of his harness. Mykkael plucked out the flowers with a gallant’s bow, then shied them into the crowd. He moved on, measuring the line-up with jaded provocation, neatly sidestepping the vixen in scarlet who tried to rake her nails down his shoulder. Her glare of contempt fixed full on his face, she spat; and again, her stabbing spite missed its mark, turned aside by his stunning, fast reflex.
‘Try again?’ Mykkael goaded, then frowned towards the madam, his eyes shadow-dark and unreadable. ‘I prefer my fights with some steel in them, yes? So, how much for Vangyar’s hot favourite?’
The huge woman smiled. ‘Too late, randy dog. She’s already with him.’
‘Is she, then?’ Mykkael raised his eyebrows, tossed one, two, three crown sovereigns with the sweet ching! of gold, into the silk-covered trough of her lap. ‘In that case, second best will have to stand in.’ He shot out a hand, clamped the wrist of the hussy who had spurned him, and laid her fingers against the rough stubble of his jaw. ‘This one will do.’
The madam nodded her triple chins, granting obscene acquiescence.
His outraged selection screeched and spun like a cat. She tried to savage him, and lost her other hand to his iron grip. ‘Spit again?’ the desert-bred captain invited. His expertise peerless, harangued at each step by a shrieked tempest of curses and the glitter of snagged beads, he manoeuvred his catch up the stairway.
He flung her off at the top of the landing, then foiled her lunge for his throat by showering coins on the floorboards. ‘Which room is Vangyar’s?’
‘What? Are you crazy?’ Dropped to her knees, her fingers scrabbling under his boots to recover his scatter of silver, the doxy glared upwards through tumbled hair.
‘Dogs usually are.’ Mykkael flicked one last coin through the gloom, this one a gleaming crown sovereign. ‘You looked like you needed the night off the most. I trust you’re well paid? Then enjoy a good sleep.’ Downstairs, the noise in the Bull’s taproom resurged. The captain spoke through its boisterous roar, each word punched with urgent clarity. ‘Which door, right or left?’
‘The one straight ahead,’ snapped the whore, left kneeling and breathless at the speed by which her lush charms were abandoned.
Mykkael quartered the corridor with soundless strides, the wasp hum of steel as he drew his sword at one with the move that tripped the latch and eased open the panel. Slick as a wraith, he slipped inside. The door he had barged clicked closed at his heels, a triumph of timing, as Jedrey’s launched raid broached the taproom downstairs, to a thunderous burst of pandemonium.
For Vangyar the horse thief, the night’s pleasure turned sour between heartbeats. A callused hand grasped his naked shoulder, and flipped him like a fish off the yielding, ripe flesh of his woman. Thrown on to his back amid twisted bedding, his roaring shove to arise was stopped cold by the edge of a longsword, touched against the shocked thrust of his manhood.
‘Stay put,’ demanded the demon-dark swordsman; then, ‘Be still,’ to the woman, whose painted eyes flew open as a draught chilled the throb of desire left unpartnered between her gaped thighs.
Before her last moan shattered into a scream, Mykkael snapped, ‘Cover yourself. Leave. Do as I ask. If he does as well, I won’t harm him.’
A rushed flurry of cloth, as the whore snatched a wrap, and fled on rouged feet through the doorway; then a bang on the floorboards, as something downstairs rammed into the ceiling in the course of the ongoing fracas.
Mykkael regarded the long face of the horse thief, dripping sweat off the trailing tips of his moustache. ‘My soldiers are raiding. They won’t come upstairs unless I change their orders. Nor do I bear a crown warrant with your name under seal as a criminal. Not yet,’ Mykkael emphasized, the relentless sword pressed to cringing, drooped flesh as Vangyar rebounded from shock into venomous fury. ‘You will answer some questions, first pass, with the truth. If you don’t, if you lie, on my word, I’ll draw blood you’ll regret for the rest of your useless life! Now, you don’t want to ruin your manly joy? All you need do is stay reasonable.’
Propped akimbo on braced elbows, Vangyar glared past his belly, and into those pitiless desert-bred eyes. ‘Ask, bitch-bred cur. Then bend your stiff neck looking over your shoulder for the rest of your days, which are numbered.’
Mykkael blinked, flashed white teeth through curved lips without smiling. ‘Fair enough. If I wanted to buy a particular black horse with silver leopard dapples, four white stockings, and a chevron-shaped star on its forehead, could you get him?’
Vangyar flopped backwards, the bristle of beard on his chin thrust against the damp pit of his throat. ‘I could,’ he said, sullen, ‘except the brute beauty’s been stolen.’
Mykkael tweaked the placed sword. ‘Elaborate. Quickly’
Through the shrieks of a woman, slashed through the chorus of male bellows from below, the horse thief reassembled his scattered wits and applied his professional knowledge. ‘Horse you want’s part of a steed wicket team, three blooded pairs who used to be pastured upriver, in the meadows behind Gurley’s cow farm.’
‘Owner?’ prompted Mykkael. The blade in his hand stayed, a needle of fire by the fluttering dip by the bedside.
Vangyar shook his head, swallowed. ‘Don’t know. The wicket team was assembled several months back, and set into training in secret.’ To ascertain the unpleasant foreigner understood, the horse thief took pains to qualify. ‘Rich folk like to do that, enter what they call “dark pairs” to tip the odds and enliven the betting. Sometimes they upset a favourite to humble a rival. Blood’s sometimes let, to keep such surprise challenges under wraps. The batch with your black was close handled, that way. Someone’s rich boy from the Highgate brought coin for their upkeep to Gurley His sons did the riding to fit them, under lists of detailed instructions.’
Mykkael absorbed the gist. ‘This black horse I’m wanting was stolen, you say?’
‘Not only him. The whole team of six was just lifted.’ Vangyar jerked his chin, snarling his resentment. ‘Let me free, you mad dog. I can try to find out who did the take. Wanted to anyway. Six culled off one pasture is ravening greed. Don’t need this territory stirred by the heat as crown law sets the countryside boiling.’
Mykkael narrowed his eyes. ‘When was this wicket team stolen?’
‘Last night.’ Vangyar glanced with exasperated rage at the sword blade, then assayed a broken-toothed grin. ‘I could get this horse, surely. With the princess gone missing, I much doubt the king’s magistrate has troubled to register the theft on the rolls. Likely fat Farmer Gurley never got through the hubbub to file his complaint.’
‘Then consider the incident registered, now.’ Mykkael lifted his sword blade. One fluid motion saw the steel run back into the sheath at his shoulder. Throughout, his hard gaze stayed pinned upon Vangyar, as though the man’s narrow nose and slab cheekbones could be engraved into permanent memory.
Downstairs, the noise rose in a crescendo, then fell back like spent surf towards order. Mykkael spoke at length. ‘I know your face, Vangyar. That says you’re a marked man. If you can’t make your way in an honest profession, I suggest you leave Sessalie tomorrow. Stay, lay your hand on another man’s livestock, and take my promise as your fair warning. Your nice lady will weep at your hanging and sleep with another the day of your burial.’
‘Bitch-bred mongrel!’ Vangyar kicked free of the sheets, shoved bandy legs to the floor, and snatched in blind rage for his clothes.
‘Might do well to bide.’ One moment more, Mykkael grinned over his victim’s stung pride. Then he strode to depart, all flaunting grace in his disreputable, bloodstained shirt. ‘Unless you want to be snagged in my raid? Somebody downstairs tags you for a horse thief, Sergeant Jedrey might haul you in.’
Hand on the latch, he sensed the sharp movement. He had already engaged on trained instinct, as the thrown knife parted the air. Dropped down, spinning back, even before the blade impaled itself in the door plank, he embraced the crystalline state that framed the reflex of barqui’ino awareness. Two blows of his hands: one placed to stun nerves, and the next to drop his attacker with a broken neck.
Vangyar reeled backwards, scarcely aware he was dying until his head thumped into the bed frame. Out straight on the floorboards, he realized he couldn’t be staring straight down at his own naked buttocks.
‘Damned fool,’ snapped Mykkael, voice like iron above him. Then metal spoke, whining clear of its sheath. The swift cut of the sword let in the night ahead of the throes of last suffering.