XXII. Assault
THE ODD SENSE OF URGENCY REACHED OUT OF NOWHERE AND SEIZED JUSSOUD BY THE HEART. HE HAD BEEN BORN TO A TRIBAL TRADITION that honoured the unseen world known to shamans. On trust and impulse, he moved at speed, grabbed Vensic’s surcoat and yanked backwards with all of his strength.
The garrison man’s attacking lunge was jerked short. The brisk parry effected by his crown guard opponent whistled short of connection.
Vensic crashed off balance into Jussoud’s braced shoulder, shouting his outraged surprise. There, the huge nomad pinned him, just as the rising spell line fully unfurled. The three men guarding Taskin’s downed litter came under attack by a crackling explosion of fire. The shielding geometry written into three talismans turned its brute force, deflecting the thrust from the party surrounding the litter. No natural conflagration, the licking whirlwind that engulfed them seemed to feed upon nothing but air.
Enveloped by the shrieking noise and scalding heat of a shredding assault, besieged by a relentless power that surged to consume, Jussoud screamed into Vensic’s ear, ‘Cross that flame with a blade, you’re a dead man!’ He kept his arms locked until the young man’s furious struggle subsided to understanding. Then the healer added, ‘Take up the litter and give me your sword.’
Trained touch countermanded the stiff surge of resistance. ‘Now!’ Jussoud cried. ‘No argument, Vensic! I carry protection. You don’t hand me your weapon, we die here.’
The spelled fire closed in. Its uncanny, mindless surge to destroy ripped and seared with a savagery beyond parallel. The thin ring sustained by Perincar’s defences withstood the onslaught, just barely. Its limited range hemmed them in like trapped rats. Such tight shielding could not ground the roused force of the element, or break the cast line of demonic power summoned in from the shadow realms of the unseen. Fire howled and raged, balked but not quenched. Its heat would scorch cloth and peel skin, if not scald the lungs with each drawn breath. By now the Fane Street physician was shouting with ragged hysteria.
Vensic released the sword, just as Jussoud’s fierce yank wrenched the weapon’s grip from his hand. ‘Bear up the litter,’ the nomad gasped, frantic. ‘Then stay at my heels. Rely on the vizier’s pattern we carry, no matter what mayhem should happen!’
Jussoud shouldered ahead. The blade in his grasp was an ill-suited match, too small and too lightly balanced. The swords he had used to train on the steppe had been curved, forged with more weight at the tip to make slashing strokes more effective. Sanouk warriors always wielded such weapons in pairs. One blade left him hamstrung and guardless.
Worse, the nomad dared not pause to mourn his broken integrity. He must cast off the grace of his healer’s oath, that forbore to cause harm through violence. A failure to act would destroy three more lives, with the innocent populace of a whole kingdom left to the plot of a sorcerer.
Either the geometry worked into the talisman could withstand the line of spell-cast destruction, or within seconds, Taskin’s protectors would succumb to a fate beyond horror to imagine. Standing firm was no option. Delay would see them all roasted. Jussoud closed his eyes, stepped forward, and trusted: first the defences Mykkael had left, that had once held strong through all but the worst lines of hot conjury spun by Rathtet’s bound sorcerers. The nomad relied on his tribal ancestry, that understood the deep realms of the spirit world. Last, he fell back upon childhood training, that had taught him the warrior’s way of the sword.
The effort to walk was like ploughing into a padded wall. Resistance arose at the interface, where the talisman’s guarding influence ran against the hurled balefires summoned by cold-struck spell lines. Jussoud firmed his will and leaned into the pressure.
‘Stay with me. Follow!’ he gasped, then blessed the response as the others rallied behind him. Sterling result of Mykkael’s tempered discipline, Vensic had managed to calm the physician. The pair of them resumed the delicate task of bearing up Taskin’s litter.
Jussoud pressed forward, and the fire line shifted. The combined advance of three matched vizier’s talismans pressed into the gyre of spelled forces and yielded a grudging span of clear ground. Another thrust forward, another hard step. Each footfall felt set in glue. Jussoud steeled his courage, and leaned on the strength of his nomad heritage. He was the son of a Sanouk royal house, born to an ancient and honourable ancestry. Through closed eyes, using mind, he groped for the shape of the otherworld, the unseen context of subtle energies that underlay the solid existence known to the animate senses.
He expanded his awareness outside human flesh. Across the first veil, he encountered the desperation and fear mirrored by his committed companions, then their more subdued counterpart: the one man, gravely wounded, lying helplessly unconscious. Jussoud traced out the ephemeral threads, where his thoughts and theirs ran in sympathy. He used mental imagery to refigure the weave, where jeopardy spun common lines of need and survival. Then he embraced those strands shared by his companions, mentally wound them into his own, and projected the flow of them forward. He angled their matrix to strengthen the forces that actively stood off the fires; and Perincar’s pattern captured that willed influx, and flowered, and resurged to a blaze of cold blue.
The fires roared and fell back. Streaming sparks, and flaring in unnatural colours, the aimed brunt of the long spell yielded. The barrier gave way in grudging retreat as Jussoud pressed his advance. He gained one step, two, over stinking, charred earth. Heat blistered his soles. He stamped out the flare of caught embers as his grass-soled sandals ignited.
The next moment, Jussoud sensed a sharp shift in the hostile conjury Deflected by the reverse spin of Perincar’s geometry, the line of demonic attack streamed into live contact with the thrusting steel of two sword blades as the lead pair of palace guardsmen bore in on the misguided chancellor’s order.
Their blades flared up, instantaneously consumed. The flash of ignition raised tearing screams, as the nexus of otherworldly destruction flowed across the bridged steel, and claimed the hapless men holding the weapons.
Their suffering described unimaginable agony. The Fire, elemental, unbound living matter. It left not a wisp of charred ash. No smoke billowed. No crackle of flame masked the victims’ shrill cries. As the flux of wild energy immolated their bodies, Jussoud beheld the abomination in its wrenching entirety. He had known the spell lines of a sorcerer drew on demonic intelligence. Never, before this, had he grasped the foul truth: that such power was bartered in exchange for men’s souls, devoured in shredding torment.
To die of the body brought healing peace. To be killed by the unclean forces of hell was to suffer a fate that transcended time.
While the screams of the guardsmen shocked through the scorched air, Jussoud sensed their wailing echoes resound past the boundary of the unseen. Demons served sorcerers, so men said in their ignorance. Made witness to the act of forced crossing at first hand, a healer’s perception beheld the reverse: that the hunger of such beings had no limit. Their ‘masters’ in harsh fact existed as slaves, perpetually constrained to feed them. If a sorcerer exhausted the lands under his conquest; if ever his supply of fresh victims fell short, he would, in his turn, be consumed. Each innocent death let the sorcerer live, one half step removed from the powers that sealed his irreversible pact with damnation.
The cruel irony that Mykkael must have borne from the Efandi defeat crashed hard against humane preference, as tribal knowledge let Jussoud comprehend the poisoned victory bought by his survival. A successful defence against sorcery permitted no saving grace of empowerment. Like the desert-bred captain before him, Jussoud could protect helpless lives, yet do nothing to spare suffering as the doomed guardsmen were inducted by the spun fury of a sorcerer’s cold-struck spell line.
No horror prepared the initiate observer. Jussoud recoiled, retching, while unspeakable, fell forces chained the matrix of two human spirits, and denied them the transition of death. Shrieking in agony that had no voice, their shades were sucked down, shackled into undying captivity to fuel the insatiable will of the demon.
‘Jussoud!’ screamed Vensic. ‘Go forward. You have to! Like it or not, we’re all Sessalie has on the front lines guarding the breach!’
Taskin alone held the power to stop this; wrest command of the guard away from the council, and out of the sorcerer’s influence. Yet the cool course of logic justified by necessity could scarcely assuage raw emotion. Jussoud pressed ahead, but not out of courage. He jammed his heart closed, shut his eyes and stepped over the razed ground out of shrinking cowardice. At the crux, he could not bear to face the abyss that yawned under his sister, Orannia.
In that dreadful moment, her brother understood the full scope of the terror that pursued her. For the first time, he realized why Mykkael had been adamant to stay by her side to prevent her from suicide. Half trapped, still alive, her madness suspended her over a death that was not going to buy her deliverance.
Worst of all, as Jussoud lived the choice that consigned two human spirits to perpetual suffering, he knew that Mykkael his brother would forgive him. Of all men, the captain well understood this moment’s poisonous self-loathing.
How many times had the desert-bred been forced to enact such hideous destruction? How many strangers and loved ones alike had been delivered to perpetual bondage by his sworn charge to save the Efandi princess?
The tainted thought followed with punishing clarity: that his decision to distribute Perincar’s talismans had invited fate to replay his most terrible nightmare. Alone, Mykkael had weighed the unbearable choice. How long had he wrestled the face of his nemesis? Where, amid screams as wrenching as these, had he found the fibre to repeat the untenable past, and attempt to guard Isendon’s daughter from the perils of a sorcerer’s conquest?
How many others must be consumed, or go mad? How many must shoulder the price meted out, suffering past the reach of a lifetime, beyond hope of reprieve, like Orannia?
For two more palace guards blocked the garden path in the company of the chancellor. One of them would be the puppet claimed and used by the sorcerer’s minion, to sustain the potentized spell line.
‘Jussoud!’ Vensic shouted. ‘Keep moving! You must! Lose ground now, and the sorcerer kills wantonly. What fate will befall the people of Sessalie if their king goes down in defeat?’
A thought fragment answered, arisen from the unseen fabric of the otherworld. Its source was no ghostly reflection prompted by ancestral wisdom. The vibrant echo received by Jussoud held the searing, explosive remorse of Mykkael’s living experience…‘my brother, by the stars of your ancestry, may you never hear such screams as these from the throat of an infant, or a child
Jussoud shuddered. Horror forced him to assay the next step.
The third stride saw the wall of fire collapse with a whistling rush of stressed air. The forces driving the demonic assault ripped away like a curtain of tissue.
Two more armed guards faced them, a half step behind the stoop-shouldered old man who served as Sessalie’s most venerable chancellor.
‘Be wary, Jussoud!’ the physician cried.
Yet the son of an ancient nomad bloodline would sense peril birthed from the unseen. Instinct raised the hair at Jussoud’s nape the instant he locked eyes with the spellbound creature before him. The frail gentleman in his fussy silk doublet had once been a timid, retiring philanthropist. He would not have stood firm through such fire and storm, except as the used glove for a minion. The immediate presence of danger roused Perincar’s talisman to spontaneous heat. Jussoud felt every scored mark in its pattern as though graven into his skin. He acted before thought, before fear, before primal reflex prompted panic-stricken flight. He balanced his mind inwards, and cried out for the guidance of ancestral instinct to steer his raw will to survive.
The timid old noble who was a live catspaw cracked out his imperious demand. ‘Guardsmen! You will set this party of traitors under arrest!’
‘We go nowhere for the hell-spawned puppet of a sorcerer,’ Jussoud said, teeth clenched with desperate defiance. Then he levelled the sword, and touched the rounded steel pommel to the talisman disc at his breast. Contact inducted its searing vibration through the forged length of the weapon. Jussoud sensed the timed moment. As the stressed metal sang aloud in his hand, he moved in the way of the warrior, and ran the elderly chancellor through his thin breast and defenceless heart.
Shock followed. The pierced body wrenched backwards and toppled. No catspaw remained, and no danger. Only an old man, dying. He sprawled on to the white gravel, convulsed by traumatic agony. Warm blood and vomit gushed at Jussoud’s feet. He recoiled, gagging, while the sword locked fast in his grip jerked free with a sucking wrench. He staggered back, overcome by the raw stink of slaughter, and crashed, numbed with shock, into Vensic.
Nor did the untried garrison man fall short as the demands of necessity fell on him.
‘Take the litter!’ The breveted sergeant’s shout struck a note of command to shore up faltering nerves. ‘Do it now! Jussoud!’ He jammed a pole into the nomad’s left hand. When the easterner’s shocked fingers failed to respond, Vensic let his grip slide. He used crisis and forced stunned confusion to resolve, engaging the healer’s instinctive reflex to guard the gravely wounded from jostling harm.
Then Vensic reached over the salvaged litter and wrenched the blooded sword out of the nomad’s stunned fingers. ‘My job, now, fellow!’
The garrison man twisted. His stopgap parry just blocked the first guardsman’s attacking lunge. The fouled steel turned the murderous thrust, barely. The bind of stressed metal slid screaming, past Jussoud’s silk-clad shoulder.
‘You handle Taskin!’ Vensic gasped, rushed. ‘I’ll clear the pathway’ As the remaining pole of the litter changed grip, he surged to the fore, sword raised to guard point to engage the assault of both palace guardsmen at once. They came on, crying treason. Their shouts rang on the night air, charged with chilling conviction. Belief fuelled their aggression. They were convinced they had just witnessed clear proof: the uncanny slaughter of two fellow guards, and the murder of an unarmed high chancellor.
‘Sure enough,’ Vensic gasped through the chiming clash, as his angled steel hammered into the first lunging blade. The turned sword shrieked aside. He ducked under the second, and lashed out with a kick. The blow caught the opposing swordsman’s wristbone. As the weapon sailed free of the victim’s bashed hand, he finished, ‘we have no choice but get out of here.’
Taskin’s guardsmen were superbly taught. Yet Mykkael’s matchless training had instilled the savagery required to survive on a battlefield. Eight months of the captain’s ruthless surprise drills had found Vensic a gifted pupil. Even disadvantaged by green nerves and stacked odds, even thrown the uncertainty of darkness, he closed in with deft speed. Once inside a man’s reach, a longsword became either a cudgel, or a disastrous hindrance. Brute infighting let Vensic turn fists and battering knees against opponents best schooled for elegant blade work. He struck to disable. Smashed joints could stop a skilled swordsman faster than landing a stroke with an edged weapon.
The two guardsmen were down, moaning, and the fouled steel wiped clean on the dead chancellor’s robe before anyone noticed: the sword that had been a garrison-forged blank now bore the faint tracery of Perincar’s geometry on the pommel.
‘Resonance,’ the little physician explained, as the litter supporting Taskin’s slack form was rushed onwards through the dark garden. ‘Jussoud picked up the aroused vibration of the talisman through sympathetic touch. Then he thrust the blade into the suborned flesh of a sorcerer’s acting catspaw. Passive protection encountered a potentized line of spellcraft, and reconfigured that energy, forcing an imprint.’
‘Do you think the new mark might grant shielding properties?’ asked Vensic, all at once overtaken by shivering dread, and the shock of his desperate action. His face looked haunted as he cut his own question short. ‘Never mind. After this, I’d be a stark madman to invite the fool’s chance to find out.’
Paused to water his mount at a freshet, Mykkael rested his brow against the forearm braced against the packhorse’s lathered shoulder. The black-and-tan hound he had borrowed at need sprawled panting next to his feet. The poor beast was likely as hard-used as he was. He had covered the last league to the ridge crest on foot to spare his exhausted gelding. The stony ground had savaged his knee, and done the stabbed thigh with the compress no favours. Plagued now by the running fire of pinched nerves, Mykkael cursed the brute legacy left by his scars. If he pushed too much harder, the leg would collapse. Here, he would have no saving help from Jussoud if his overstressed resources failed him.
Thought of the nomad closed a sharp spark of contact, raising a flicker of witch thought: of searing grief, and the captured impression of the aftermath of a deadly fight: two men had burned, consumed by a sorcerer’s spell line; and a sweet-natured old chancellor taken as catspaw now lay dead. The corpse sprawled alongside two staunch palace guards, brought down by Vensic’s expedient infighting. Jussoud shouldered the weight of Taskin’s litter, his steadfast nature cruelly torn: that necessity had granted no time for a field splint to ease the injured men’s agony…
‘Ah, my brother,’ Mykkael gasped, his astonished relief over Vensic’s survival made bittersweet by the penalty of Jussoud’s remorse. ‘I weep for your sorrows. If we survive to share sennia together, I’ll tell you the sore truth: two men down, but alive, is a blessing beyond measure. And the spell-ridden chancellor was much worse than dead on the sorry moment you struck him.’ Perincar’s mark, and the clean steel of the sword, had actually delivered the old man to the mercy of a natural crossing.
By now high upcountry Mykkael breathed deep to resettle his unruly awareness. The cold air ran thin as a knife-blade into his overtaxed lungs, chilled by the ice on the rims of the peaks. If the sky showed no moon, the snowfields reflected a measure of ambient light. Stars pierced the black zenith between the whispering needles of evergreen.
The scrub was too thick to permit a view downwards. Yet when Mykkael glanced back, he felt a grue of unease chase his spine, as though arcane pursuit searched the ground near his backtrail.
When the saddled horse lifted its dripping muzzle, he urged the pack animal to the streamside, and scratched its soaked neck while it drank. Then he cajoled the tired hound on to her feet and pressed relentlessly onwards, up the boulder-snagged spine of the ridge. To judge by Benj’s description of landmarks, the most likely glen to conceal six horses lay another two leagues further on. Mykkael must decipher the poacher’s instructions and discover that hidden cleft ahead of the questing sorcerer. Four more hours of hard going, provided his knee held, and two winded horses could withstand the rigorous ascent.
Mykkael wound his grip through the gelding’s damp mane, clamped his jaw, and forced his aching leg to bear weight. As he limped through the dark, over flint rocks and gnarled roots, he sensed the distanced, jumbled impression: of stone stairs, walled in by the rippled glass panes of the late queen’s conservatory. Stars shone through, distorted as run silver, as three men, breathing hard, groped upwards by touch. They climbed with urgent, desperate care, bearing a wounded man on a litter. The air wore the humid must of mulched earth and the ethereal fragrance of roses, woven through by the rank tang of danger…
A jarring, slipped step regrounded strayed thoughts. Mykkael hissed a ragged curse through his teeth. No oath could do aught to relieve the pain that lanced through the small of his back. Since the shuddering tremors were not going to release, he chose prudence before pity, and remounted the tired gelding. Higher he wound, through the stands of stunted evergreen, while the lit windows of Sessalie’s scattered farmsteads glimmered through the mist silting the vale far below.
When the ridge back sheared into a near vertical ravine, Mykkael shifted the load off the stumbling pack horse. He slipped the hackamores and let both exhausted animals go free. Hereafter, the clanging scrape of shod hooves and the falls of loose stone dislodged by their passage would cause too much noise. He dared not risk hazing the fugitive princess into a needless, blind panic.
Light flooded out of the council hall windows, a setback Jussoud noted with stark apprehension. By the muffled clamour of voices inside, and the coming and going of servants in Devall’s livery, Collain Herald was losing the thankless task of maintaining lawful order. Like undertow during a shifting tide, the cascade of events had disrupted the secure process of Sessalie’s succession.
‘That’s the guard for the crown prince’s formal retinue, parked over there by the entrance,’ the Fane Street physician pointed out. His gloomy whisper cast echoes off the glass roof, as he mopped his round face with his coat tail. ‘Inevitable, I suppose, that young Kailen should press his right to his father’s authority.’ Worried, since Jussoud still bent over the stilled form of Commander Taskin, he added, ‘His lordship is slipping deeper into shock?’
‘Yes. The foreseeable difficulty.’ Jussoud sighed. ‘His blood pressure’s low from severe loss of blood. The elevated pulse rate won’t come down, I’m afraid, until we have him settled and still.’
‘Well, the bandage is still dry, he’s not started bleeding,’ the physician assured him, his stubborn optimism seeking for good amid an increasingly grim situation.
Paused to rest, with the litter shafts braced on the overhead balcony above the shadowed beds of the queen’s roses, the healers attending the wounded commander faced the raw brunt of their predicament. For the unexpected session held in the council hall made the direct route to the king’s chambers impossible to attempt.
Moments later, Vensic’s light tread returned, grating over the gritted planks under the roof where the royal gardeners forced seedlings in flat boxes. ‘No going by way of the back corridor, either. There are now posted guards flanking each of the doorways. I can’t fight them all.’ His strained distress reflected his dread, that he might face a cold-blooded repeat of the tactics just used in the garden. ‘Bad business to try, since they’re probably sentries following reasonable orders, and not suborned by the enemy’
‘We won’t risk more killing,’ Jussoud agreed, a decision that brought small relief.
For they now confronted the fallback position that Taskin had outlined with bald-faced reluctance: to unseal the ancient brick passage in the walls, then access the concealed vault underlying the late queen’s apartments. ‘Go that route,’ the experienced commander had husked, ‘you’ll be vulnerable. If the king has fallen to the sorcerer’s faction, you could find yourselves trapped without recourse.’
‘Soonest started, then,’ murmured the Fane Street physician. He finished buffing his clouded spectacles. Then he bent and shouldered his end of the litter, even his dauntless nature subdued by the perils lying ahead.
The balcony ended where the glass conservatory met the buttressing wall of the wing that housed the grand ballroom. In daytime, the row of high lancet windows let the light stream downwards in striated patterns across polished hardwood floors. By night, the windows were jet wells, poked with mud-speckled straw where the jackdaws had nested. Vensic was forced to his knees, to grope for the wrought-iron grating.
‘We don’t dare use a candle,’ Jussoud replied to the physician’s disturbed query.
The dusty panes of the upper conservatory could be seen from the guard-post at Highgate. From here, even the briefest struck light would shine far and wide like a beacon.
The grate Vensic encountered was crusted with rust. He scraped his knuckles against rough brick, prying to free the obstruction. Worse, a light bobbed at the far end of the conservatory, trailed by a flurry of voices.
‘If they’re in here, we’ll flush them,’ a searcher assured an unseen commanding officer.
Vensic worked at the jammed grate with desperate focus. The marginal gain when it gave and pulled free was followed by crushing defeat, as the aperture in the wall opened into cobwebs and bottomless darkness. The musty spokes of a ladder descended, too steep to accommodate an unconscious man on a litter.
‘We can’t do this,’ Jussoud gasped, tortured. ‘We can’t carry Taskin down in his state! The shoulder is going to tear.’
‘Surrendered alive, his fate will be worse if he falls to a sorcerer’s minion.’ The physician shook his head, brisk. ‘No choice,’ he whispered. ‘We’ll have to set him into a sling.’ To the eastern nomad, who had not served in war, he added his brusque reassurance. ‘I’ve solved this before. It’s the way wounded men are brought down from high battlements when no one can access the stairs.’
‘I’ve practised the technique,’ Vensic added. Sword drawn, he worked fast, slicing through the soft ties binding Taskin into the litter. ‘Mykkael’s drills were more thorough than anyone imagined we’d ever need.’
The physician added his agile assistance. In short order, Taskin’s body was shifted, and the canvas drawn from the poles. Quick cuts fashioned two crude leg holes. Another, higher up, was positioned to support the upper body, slung by the unwounded arm. Then the canvas was folded in half, the commander’s slack frame supported within like a child in an oversized nappy. The torn shoulder was left tightly strapped to his chest. The canvas could now be raised by the corners, overlapped at each side. A pair of strong men, from above, and another to guide Taskin’s legs from below, could now ease his unconscious weight down the ladder.
‘Jussoud and I will handle the work from above,’ Vensic instructed the physician. A glance over the balcony showed more lights, streaming steadily closer. ‘You go first, and if you pray, beg the powers of grace we won’t stand on a dry-rotted ladder.’
No time for second thoughts, and no breath for regrets or recriminations, as the three harried men hoisted Taskin and descended into the ink-dark shaft leading down to the hypocaust. From there, they must make their way under the floor, and find the vent that accessed the warren of passageways carved beneath the old wing of the palace.
Nor did they dare, even then, strike a light. A chance gleam cast through a chink or crevice would give their position away. Progress was reduced to a groping trial of cramped quarters and unrelieved darkness, broken by the clomp of the searchers’ boots, or the dusty fall of strayed torchlight through the gaps in the sagging floorboards. The hypocaust was a warren for rats, festooned with dense cobwebs, and shining with foetid puddles leaked by the terracotta pipes. The space was too tight to sit upright. A task force of guardsmen creaked over their heads, showering down grit and stirred spiders. The fugitives made their way at a tortuous crawl, with Taskin inched forward in tender, slow stages, either laid over two men who slid on their backs, or else pulled along on the canvas sling, with one man or another on hands and knees at his side to guard his strapped shoulder from mishap.
They escaped the conservatory through a hatch at the back of the caldarium, then ploughed through the pits where the ashes were piled for fertilizer. Vensic and Jussoud bore up the litter, with the pink-faced physician masked in his handkerchief, in desperate straits not to sneeze. Persistence saw them across the conduit of the old sewer by way of a plank that threatened to crack at each step. From there, they traversed the drain from the laundry, creeping in single file down a narrow ledge of slicked stone, while noisome waters lapped at their ankles.
Beyond, the dank shaft of a stairwell ascended to the wardrobe of the late queen’s apartment.
‘How’s Taskin?’ whispered the physician through the pause at the landing to recoup taxed breath and wrung nerves.
Jussoud sat with the commander’s bare feet in his lap, pressing reflex points with skilled fingers. ‘He can’t handle much more of this.’
‘Two storeys,’ Vensic murmured. Soaked leather squelched as he shifted his weight in the darkness, perhaps to make sure of his weapon. ‘We should go. Delay’s just as likely to kill him.’
For the muffled sound of raised voices carried down through the stairwell, dire warning the binding dispute in the council had ascended to storm the king’s chamber.
‘Taskin’s stable as he’s going to get in these straits.’ Jussoud peeled off the marred silk of his overrobe, and fashioned a sling to support the wounded commander’s dangling legs. ‘Let’s get him up where there’s light, and a bed. I can’t do any more for him here, but watch him lose ground he couldn’t afford in the first place.’
The game little physician shoved erect, faintly wheezing, and muscled his share of the burden. The climb up the narrow, turnpike stair passed with relative ease, while the rising argument in progress above unfolded with alarming clarity.
‘…in league with the sorcerer!’ cried the seneschal’s excitable tenor. ‘The two guardsmen maimed in the garden just swore they saw that steppeland nomad raise balefire and burn two hapless souls to oblivion!’
Bennent’s gravel bass tendered a reply, a rumble too low to decipher.
The seneschal’s ranting broke in again, cranked to the shrill edge of hysteria. ‘…commander told you to burn all this cedar? You know that such smoke could call in fell spirits, even attract the most dangerous of conjury! If you don’t quench that fire and post additional guards to stand watch at the royal bedside, I’ll have to advise Prince Kailen that your better judgement may have been compromised. You could be suborned by the selfsame sorcery that overthrew Taskin this morning!’
‘Hurry!’ gasped Vensic, his steady nerve shaken. ‘If I have to bear steel within the king’s presence, you realize they’ll drop us with crossbows.’
Above the last risers, a chink of light leaked past the concealed panel in the wardrobe. Jussoud squeezed aside to give Vensic space to search for the recessed latch.
Yet the panel gave way without touch or fumbling. The hinges creaked wide, and a candle lamp glared in dazzling brilliance upon them.
The three squinting fugitives made out the gleam of two guardsmen’s helms, then the form of an elegant old woman bearing a cane. ‘I wondered if you’d try to sneak up the back way,’ stated the indomitable Duchess of Phail.
Jussoud bowed his head. He gathered himself, spoke, even through the despair of dashed hope. ‘My lady, Commander Taskin is sinking. Would you deny him the right to his final bequest? He has risked his life for the chance to speak to the king, words he counted above his survival.’
‘To condemn that slinking desert-bred?’ snapped the duchess, past patience. ‘A cause scarcely worthy of his lordship’s last breath!’ Her clipped gesture signalled the guardsmen.
‘Perhaps to clear a staunch man’s defamed character.’ Jussoud matched the aged duchess’s scorn, the grave dignity of his ancestry backed by his courageous regret. ‘Choose wisely, grandmother. For want of the truth, the cost could extend to uncounted innocent lives.’
‘We’ve lost three such already, so I understand.’ The duchess thumped her cane and pronounced with snappish asperity, ‘How fortunate for you Lady Lindya was born with a woman’s good sense! She sent word ahead. We’ve all been anxiously expecting your arrival for the better part of two hours.’
The granddame tipped her white head to the pair of standing guardsmen. ‘Come along, help them through. Glory preserve us, if I’d realized the ruffians planned to traipse through the sewers, I’d have asked the servants to make up Taskin’s sickbed using the second-best linen.’