At the pause, almost every breath in the room was held.
“Is still in Harndon fighting the plague … Tamsin and Kerak launched a successful attack on the … dragon. Your brother is now retreating through the western lands toward the Cohocton and believes that he will make Lissen Carak in fifteen or twenty days.”
The razor had begun to work its way to his temples.
Gabriel tried not to nod. “Ouch,” he said softly. “What bird?”
“E.21,” Kronmir said. “He’s been especially good, and fast at the long hauls.”
Gabriel smiled very slightly.
The solar door opened and Blanche, dressed in a very plain overgown, no shift, and wet hair, came in.
“Empress,” Anne said sharply.
Gabriel heard them all bow, or curtsy. It was a distinctive rustling noise, a silence, a thump as knees went to stone.
“I don’t seem to have a clean shift,” Blanche said cheerfully.
Jock MacGilly gulped audibly. “Which …” he began.
Toby stepped past the big Hillman. “It’ll be ready directly, my lady,” he said.
Blanche stepped up next to the nervous boy. “Is that my shift?” she asked.
MacGilly almost expired. He turned bright red.
“Your iron isn’t hot enough,” Blanche said. “Here, look. See, Anne’s put all the irons … nicely done. Take a little water …” She flicked her damp fingers and the droplets sizzled against the mirror-bright surface of the iron. “Perfect.”
“I told him,” Anne said cuttingly.
“Ironing isn’t easy,” the empress said. “Not like fighting military campaigns or learning to joust. Laundry takes patience and concentration.” She smiled, and MacGilly became redder.
She waited.
Ser Paval came and kissed her hand. Sauce gave her a hug. Blanche rolled her eyes.
“I can do this faster myself,” she said in the voice she’d have used to a laundry maid.
Sauce laughed aloud. “Aye, welcome to command,” she said. “Just when you get good at something, you get promoted, and suddenly you have to give orders to some lout to do something ye can do better yersel.”
Blanche laughed, and then like an adder striking, her hand reached out and plucked the iron from the Hillman’s hand. “I hope you are good at fighting,” she said.
“I am that!” MacGilly said.
“Because you need a lot of help with ironing,” she said. “I may be empress, but at the moment I have two shifts, and this is one of them, and if you burn it, I’ll burn you.”
She hip-checked the big man, took his place, and deftly finished the neckline of her shift.
Cully put an assortment of fruit in a solid gold bowl on the sideboard.
“Duchess of Venike is requesting admission,” he said in a growl.
“Christ,” Ser Michael said, yawning as he came through the solar door. “Let’s go back to the army. It’s too cramped here.” He swayed to miss the reinforcement of Anne’s shaving water, fresh from the hearth, and seized the emperor’s hippocras and drained it.
“Bastard,” muttered Gabriel.
“Only a rumour,” Ser Michael said. “My mother was in fact a saint.” He finished the hippocras with relish. Then he relented and handed his cup to Robin, his squire.
At the word saint, Blanche flushed and Gabriel looked at his right hand. But the sun was well up, the light good, and there was nothing to see.
“Isn’t drinking my morning cup some form of lese majestie?” Gabriel asked plaintively.
“The Duchess of Venike,” Anne said as she began the left side of his face.
The duchess sketched a brief curtsy in response to the volley of bows and gazed adoringly at Blanche, who was finishing her shift with one eyebrow raised and had, when she raised her arm, a good handspan of attractive flesh showing.
“I think you might start a new fashion,” the Duchess of Venike said.
Blanche smiled. “Pregnancy?” she asked.
“That’s not a fashion, it’s a curse,” Kaitlin, Michael’s lady, pushed into the crowded room. “Blanche, do you have a clean shift?”
“I do now,” Blanche said. “And you can’t have it.”
The duchess held up a pair of scrolls rolled in green leather. “I finished it,” she said. “Who is next?”
Gabriel looked up. “Sauce. That is, Ser Alison. When she’s done, Ser Pavalo.”
Pavalo looked up. “What is it?” he asked.
“The Empress Livia’s codex on war and the gates,” Gabriel said. “I found it in Liviapolis.”
“We should have copies …” Pavalo said.
“No copies,” Michael said. “No copies ever. Until we pull this off, no one can be allowed to know what we plan. This room is the sole place where it is safe to discuss these things; everyone is checked.”
Kronmir nodded. “Repeatedly,” he said.
Toby went through the door, determined to find linens for the ladies of the casa if he had to strip them off the Duchess of Arles and her ladies.
Robin, always his best comrade, pulled his arm. “I know just the man,” he said. “Come.”
The two walked down a short staircase that Toby had missed, and Robin hailed a squire, a well-dressed young man of his own age, in Gallish.
The man bowed. He turned to Toby and said in fair Alban, “I’m the marshal’s squire, de Coustille.” The marshal’s squire was tall and so thin that he appeared ill; Toby realized that almost four months of siege had not been kind to even the rich and powerful here, and the bowl of fruit really was a noble gift.
“Toby,” Toby said, holding out his hand.
“Ah, Jean,” said the other. “We use surnames.” He nodded to Robin. “As I told Lord Robin, my lady sent us to help you.” He indicated half a dozen men and two women, all well dressed, although every one of them was somewhat too thin for their clothes.
“God bless you,” Toby said with real feeling. “Can your lady produce some clean, ironed shifts for ladies?” He paused.
Jean grinned. He looked at the older woman, an aged crone of perhaps twenty-six. “Meliagraund?” he asked.
She frowned fiercely. “I’ll see it done. Give me a strong back and ten minutes, my lords.”
Jean bowed. “Done. Our duchess said you would need us.”
Toby nodded. “While I have your ear, my lord, the emperor desires a meeting—a council. At the duchess’s pleasure …”
Jean de Coustille smiled. “A quarter hour?” he asked.
“Great hall?” asked Toby, as if they were conspirators.
Jean swept an only slightly ironic bow and pointed; two of the young men ran off.
Toby ducked back through the door and up the steps.
“I found them last night,” Robin said apologetically. “I meant to tell you and then I went to sleep.”
Toby shrugged. He was thinking that four months of siege had made the Arlatians a strong team; all the bureaucracy and falsity was stripped away. They could move quickly.
Back in the main solar, the Red Knight was out of the chair and toweling his face; the Hillman, MacGilly, had the emperor’s clean hose over one arm and his doublet over another. Cully had his boots and a sword belt, but he set them on a stool when Toby motioned him to the door. The Duchess of Venike was sitting on the fireside stool, crouched forward over the chart with Ser Pavalo, Kronmir, and Sauce. Anne was very carefully oiling the razors she had used.
“Toby,” Gabriel said over the chart. “Great hall if we may use it, the duchess herself if she is willing, fifteen minutes.”
“Done,” said Toby with infinite satisfaction.
He watched Ser Gabriel’s face register this.
“Attend me yourself,” Gabriel said. “Sauce? Duchess? Kronmir and Paval; Michael. Blanche?”
“Military?” Blanche asked.
“Yes,” he answered.
Blanche leaned out of the bedroom. “May I decline?” she asked.
“I don’t h
ave Sukey and I don’t have Nicodemus,” Gabriel said.
“Damn. I’ll come,” Blanche said. “Where’s Sukey?”
“Saving the world,” the emperor snapped. “Like everyone else.”
Kaitlin took Anne’s arm and looked at Gabriel.
“Yes,” Gabriel said, freeing his best page to help his wife dress.
Cully came through the solar door with an incongruous armload of women’s linens. Lady Meliagraund was framed briefly in the doorway, a look of unfeigned pleasure on her face.
Kaitlin shrieked, took the whole pile, and dove through the bedroom door.
Cully looked smug. He and Sauce shared a look, and both laughed.
The Duchess of Venike looked back and forth. “What is so funny?” she asked.
Sauce shrugged. “When I was a whore, Cully was our bouncer. He used to hate bringing us our laundry, right, Cully?”
Gabriel smiled and put an arm into a tightly cut sleeve.
Silence fell; absolute silence.
The Duchess of Venike leaned back and roared. She slapped her booted thigh. “Well,” she said. “It’s good to know we all had busy lives before we met.”
“Isn’t it?” asked Sauce with a wicked grin.
The duchess shrugged. “I was going to be a whore, but I killed someone.”
“I did the same in reverse,” Sauce said. “I was a whore, and then I killed someone.”
Pavalo Payam was blushing through his beard.
Toby stepped in and began lacing the emperor’s skin-tight silk doublet.
Gabriel was leaning slightly over the chart on the table. “We need to find Du Corse,” he said.
Kronmir nodded. “If he is still in the game—” he said.
“Exactly!” Gabriel replied. “I suppose you’d tell me if you’d located the Necromancer,” he said.
Kronmir shot him a look.
Toby began to lace a sleeve.
Cully picked up a boot and rubbed his elbow across the leather and made a face.
“MacGilly, we’ll want small beer, this bowl of fruit, and perhaps some bread while we take counsel,” Gabriel said.
The Hillman stood, apparently appalled that the emperor had spoken to him by name.
Michael took a piece of Mortirmir’s apple, cut it in half, gave half to the Duchess of Venike, and went over to help Toby. “You getting shafted here?” Michael asked. He was the former squire.
“Mightily,” Gabriel said.
Michael nodded. “I’ll help and so will Kaitlin.”
“Almost there,” said Toby. He took the overdoublet with hanging sleeves and held it up while the emperor laced his own braes to his doublet. There are things a man has to do for himself.
“I’d take a bite of apple,” Gabriel said.
Mortirmir cut him a slice, took out the seeds, and put it directly into Gabriel’s mouth as his hands were otherwise occupied.
“I think I have found the Necromancer,” the mage said, as if it was a matter of little consequence.
Every head turned.
Mortirmir was a tall, gawky, difficult seventeen-year-old prodigy. He shrugged. “I knew he wouldn’t cast. So I looked for someone not casting.”
“How?” Gabriel asked.
“Must I?” Mortirmir asked. “I feel like a performing seal.”
“Humour me,” Gabriel said.
The mage shrugged. “He is as mighty a practitioner as Harmodius or I. Mightier. When he casts, he no doubt uses the natural waves of ops that flow over the world and through the earth. Yes?”
Gabriel nodded.
“But the guilty flee where no man pursueth,” Mortirmir said. “He must be aware of his use of the waves of ops both here and in the aethereal. So all I had to do was look for places that were too still. Normal places have a steady ebb and flow of ops. Like a breeze. I found a place where there’s no movement of ops at all, in the real or in the aethereal.”
“Because?” Gabriel asked.
Mortirmir sighed in exasperation and even rolled his eyes. “Because he’s dampening the flow to hide himself!” he said, as if this explained everything.
Gabriel nodded. “So … you … found him.”
Mortirmir made a moue. “To be accurate, I found a place where these conditions pertain. I’d have to go there to flush him into the open. And he might eat me if I did. We took him by surprise, night before last. We won’t surprise him again.”
“May I ask you to speculate how he evaded us in the first place?” Gabriel asked.
Michael was settling his former master’s collar. “Is he still a threat, shorn of all his not-dead?”
Mortirmir shrugged. “I have no idea. I’m going to guess that he wasn’t here with his not-dead; he was on his way to face us in the real. Over by the mountains. But honestly? I have no idea.”
Gabriel nodded. “We have no idea about most things, Michael. Until two days ago, he was one of the major players in the Game of Gates. I think we need to finish him.”
Payam nodded from the chart. “Exactly what I came here to say. And to be honest, lord, to my master and my people, the destruction of the Necromancer was always the first priority.”
“Whereas to my husband and my people,” the Duchess of Venike said from the other side of the map, “it is the new Patriarch of Rhum who is the threat.”
“And that, my friends, is why we are meeting in five minutes in the great hall,” Gabriel said. He was fully dressed: red silk hose, red silk doublet, red silk overdoublet with the imperial eagle embroidered in red silk thread. Toby put his golden plaque belt around his hips and Cully put a dagger on one side and an arming sword on the other, but Gabriel shook off the arming sword.
“War sword,” he said.
Cully fetched it and buckled it on while Gabriel drank down a full cup of hippocras.
Blanche emerged from the bedroom in a gold silk overgown over a skin-tight midnight blue kirtle with gold trim that matched her hair. She, too, wore a knight’s belt of gold plaques. She had a white silk veil on her hair and a very simple circlet, also of gold, and Michael got the Red Knight’s hat, or rather, the emperor’s, a red wool bycocket with the Red Knight’s pentagram and a gold circlet and a purple-crimson ostrich plume that stood up two feet over his head.
Toby handed him white leather gloves, which he put on.
Blanche curtsied to him, and he bowed to her, and together they swept through the solar, through the outer study, where Master Julius and his two secretaries rose and bowed before going back to an endless series of orders and passports. Gabriel paused and leaned very close to Master Julius’s ear and whispered.
The former notary glowed with pleasure. “An hour,” he said. “Two if you want the message to your brother to go out on schedule.”
“Do that. I can give you … four hours,” the emperor said, calculating quickly. “Toby, I will not need you to attend me. Stay here and take a breath.” He smiled, and Toby smiled back.
The emperor took his wife’s hand and slipped through the door, followed in order of precedence by the duchess, Ser Michael, Pavalo, Sauce, and Kronmir, and then Kaitlin, now dressed in linens and still lacing her kirtle, and MacGilly, who, for his sins, had all the dirty linens to take to the laundry.
Anne went to the sideboard, picked up her cold cider, and drank it off.
Toby was staring into space.
“We lived,” Anne said. The solar was empty but for the two of them.
Toby sighed. “I should be attending him,” he said.
“Let him stew a minute,” she said, and poured him some hot cider.
Toby sat where the emperor had sat to be shaved, crossed his legs, and drank his cider. He ate a piece of fruit.
Then he froze. “Damn MacGilly!”
He said, leapt up, took the bowl of fruit, and headed for the great hall.
Anne was left alone. She sighed for another missed opportunity, and started cleaning the room.
The Adnacrags
Nita Qwan sat comfort
ably, his back against a tall spruce, and smoked, and missed his wife. He passed the pipe, which had a bitter tang, to young Ser Aneas. Nita Qwan had had a day in which to get to know the youngest Muriens, and the man reminded him powerfully of someone, but Nita Qwan couldn’t quite put the arrow in the target.
It didn’t matter.
Aneas was using his small baton to build an image of the Adnacrags and the plains beyond, where the mountains sloped down into the basin of the Inland Seas and their two great outflow rivers. To the east, the river flowed north and east out of the Inland Seas and into the ocean. To the west, the great Meridi, or central river, flowed almost due south into the unknown, watering lands no man had ever seen, even Outwallers; where the great hives of bogglins and the deep swamps full of hastenoch and the hills were the exclusive preserve of the trolls. Or so it was said by the irks.
Aneas’s model didn’t include any of that. He limited himself to the edge of the Adnacrags, and the plains that ran down to the River, from the Cranberry Lake, which Outwallers called Wgotche, and into which the Woodhull flowed from the south. The Cranberry flowed south in a larger river, the Cranberry or Wgotche, which flowed into the river from the south, to the rocks and islets that filled the end of the Inland Sea, the Mille Isles opposite Napana, which lay in ruins.
“Thorn was learning strategy,” Aneas said. He pointed at the dot that marked the former Outwaller town of Napana. “By destroying Napana, he divided us from the Outwallers. Your people from my people.”
Nita Qwan glanced at his mentor, the old hunter Ta-se-ho. “Many among my people would be deeply happy to be separated from yours, Lord of Ticondonaga.” He shrugged. “I mean no quarrel. But you are lords of the wall, and we are the peoples who live outside the wall.”
“Allies,” Aneas said.
Nita Qwan nodded. “But not subjects.”
Aneas looked affronted. Ta-se-ho passed the pipe and shook his head. “Nita Qwan says what the matrons have charged him to say. And the destruction of Napana is worse than you say; in the first rustle of spring, our people fled west to Mogon. The Squash Country is empty.”
Aneas was looking at his map. “Imagine that Orley is somewhere here,” he said, pointing to the banks of the Great River between Cranberry River and the Rocks. “He must be. And trying to move his new army and his old adherents across the sweet water into the Squash Country.”