The Gypsy King (5 page)

Suddenly, he heard the sound of running feet in the hallway outside, followed by a brisk knock at the door.

“Come,” he said.

At once, the door flew open and a member of his personal guard announced that a messenger had arrived.

“Send him in,” ordered Mordecai, wincing slightly as he tried to sit up straighter.

The guard bellowed the order to enter and the next instant a breathless, bedraggled man with the look and bearing of an ordinary foot soldier stumbled into the room. Snatching the cap from his head, he clutched it to his heaving breast and dropped to one knee.

“My Lord Regent,” he murmured, bowing his head.

“Yes, yes,” muttered Mordecai as he sourly eyed the breadth of the man's shoulders. “You have news?”

“Yes, Your Grace!” cried the man. “I have ridden all the way from the southern edge of the Great Forest! Four days and nights without rest, changing horses whenever—”

“I don't care about any of that,” snapped Mordecai. “Was the lowborn revolt stamped out?”

“It was, my lord,” said the soldier, bobbing his head, “even though it was the biggest one yet, by my reckoning. Ignorant, ungrateful wretches, they were—why, when General Murdock offered those who'd been turned off their land a chance to join the next transport of lowborns being shipped north to work the sheep farms in the foothills of the Mountains of Khan, they jeered him! Jeered
him
—General Murdock himself!” exclaimed the soldier, as though he still couldn't believe it.

“And how did General Murdock respond?” asked Mordecai, smiling slightly in anticipation of the answer.

“He invited the rebel leaders to share their grievances over a sizzling joint of beef,” said the soldier. “Gave them his word of honour that no harm would befall them, and when the ingrates suggested that the General's word alone was an insufficient guarantee of their safety, he offered as hostages his two finest lieutenants.”

Clever
, thought Mordecai. “Go on,” he said softly.

“The leaders came, then. They were wary at first, but the General greeted them as equals and sat them at his own table and poured their wine with his own hand, and as the night wore on they grew comfortable and began to speak freely. Then,” continued the soldier, dropping his voice a notch, “nigh about midnight, when the evening had descended into shouts of drunken laughter and
lustily sung refrains, General Murdock invited the rebel leaders to take a view of the night sky from the topmost tower of the castle. The boldest among them leapt from his seat, threw his filthy arm about the General's shoulders and bellowed for him to lead the way. General Murdock threw back his head and laughed, and when they reached the top of the tower, he shoved the man to his death.” Here, the soldier paused. “The others were quickly overcome.”

“And their families?”

“Barricaded inside their shelters and burned alive, my lord,” said the soldier, faltering for the first time. “Even … even the children. The screaming was … terrible. And then there was silence.”

Without warning, Mordecai's ears were filled with the shrill, long-ago screams of another family being burned alive. Clapping his hands over his ears, he ground his teeth together and waited for the terrible sounds to fade. When at last they did, he dropped his hands to his lap and raggedly asked after the General's lieutenants.

“Torn to pieces by the mob,” said the soldier. “General Murdock answered by hanging the first hundred lowborn men who crossed his path, selling their widows into servitude and transporting their children to the Mines of Torodania.”

Mordecai nodded, well pleased. In spite of his best efforts to educate them otherwise, some Erok lowborns continued to believe that they had some right to the air they breathed and the land upon which their families had squatted for centuries. Likewise, some surviving members
of the conquered tribes continued to resist Erok rule in spite of having seen their way of life destroyed and their populations decimated through massacre, marginalization and enslavement.

Luckily, General Murdock—that shining example of all that a New Man should be—had always proven himself singularly adept at handling the problems caused by such troublemakers.

Of course, Mordecai saw no need to share his satisfaction with the able-bodied wretch who yet knelt before him, so he merely muttered, “I'd have hanged a thousand,” and asked when he could expect to receive the valuable prisoner whose delivery had been delayed by the need to put down the revolt.

“Oh, uh, well, I'm not exactly sure, Your Grace,” said the soldier uncomfortably. “See, um, the night after the hangings someone set fire to the General's tent. Normally, o'course, an intruder wouldn't have been able to get within a cat's throw of the General's tent without losing some vital piece of his filthy, good-for-nothing person. But … but on this particular night … well, uh, for s-some reason the sentries … they, uh—”

“Stop this foolish babbling or I will have you beheaded!” bellowed Mordecai.
“Tell me what happened to the sentries!”

“They fell asleep!” blurted the soldier with a spasm of fear. “All of them, all at once! And what a strange sleep it was—after failing to detect liquor on their breath, the duty sergeant kicked my younger brother nearly to death trying to revive him, to no avail. He and his fellow sentries were as dead to this world as … well, as the dead! And
when they awoke the next day they were sick enough to wish they were dead. And that is all I know!”

By the flickering glow of the fire's light, Mordecai stared at the soldier in silence for so long that the blood drained from the man's face and the chill of the room penetrated his core.

“I see,” said Mordecai at length. “So am I to understand that you and the other men will be delayed in delivering my prisoner to me due to the need to bury the charred remains of your general?”

“N-no,” stammered the soldier. “General Murdock escaped the fire unharmed.”

“Ah,” crooned Mordecai. “Then you will be delayed owing to the need to soothe and care for your dear, sick brother and the other negligent sentries?”

Mutely, the soldier shook his head.

Mordecai gripped the arms of his throne-like chair and leaned forward as far as his twisted back would allow. “Then tell me,” he said in a dangerously soft voice. “What … is the cause … of the
delay
?”

“Sabotage!” cried the soldier, who was, by this point, visibly quaking. “While we were busy trying to rescue the General and douse the first fire, the scoundrels who'd set it stole through the camp setting other fires. By the time we realized what was happening, half the camp was ablaze! Such was the chaos that the filthy ne'er-do-wells were able to lurk undetected for some time afterward, slicing our tacking to ribbons, stealing weapons, destroying food stores and somehow ensuring that every last one of our supply wagons was fed to the
inferno. And—forgive me, Your Grace, for this is the very worst of it—by the time anyone thought to check on the prisoner, he was gone!”

For a long moment, Mordecai said nothing, only eyed the soldier malevolently, as though he was personally responsible for the disaster.

“Forgive me, Your Grace,” repeated the soldier in a pleading voice.

Instead of answering him, Mordecai nodded in the direction of one of the liveried servants pressed against the wall. Instantly, the man strode forward and, without a flicker of expression on his face, dealt the soldier a vicious blow—the kind of blow that Mordecai himself would have dealt if he'd been able. The soldier—who didn't lift so much as a finger to defend himself—was knocked backward by the force of it. When the soldier was finally able to drag himself back into a kneeling position, Mordecai was pleased to see that the blow had knocked out the man's two front teeth.

“This news displeases me,” he said, smiling broadly to display his own perfect teeth. “I dislike excuses and I grow tired of hearing them. Lately, I can't seem to turn around without finding myself subjected to the insufferable babblings of some untried New Man who has failed in his duties.” Mordecai steepled his fingers and frowned as though thinking hard. “I cannot believe that after all these years General Murdock has suddenly grown incompetent, so I am forced to conclude that the men under his command are the problem. Perhaps
my
problem would be solved if I sent General Murdock different men—and
shipped you, your brother and the other incompetents onward to the mines.”

At this, the soldier grew even paler—so pale that the blood that continued to stream from his ruined mouth looked as red as rubies by contrast. “No, Your Grace,
please
,” he gasped, his voice garbled both by the blood and by the loss of teeth. “My battalion is already tracking the scoundrels responsible for the theft of the prisoner, and I swear to you that we'll find them. And when we do, we'll take them apart piece by piece and deliver the prisoner here to you in Parthania or die trying!”

Beneath the brittle veneer of bravado and shining optimism, the man's terror was clearly visible, and the air was thick with the smell of it. Mordecai was seized by a sudden urge to have the wretch beaten to death for being such a cowardly waste of a healthy body, but he forced himself to resist the temptation.

It had already been a long day, after all, and if he overexerted himself with entertainment tonight, he would pay dearly for it tomorrow.

“Oh, stop your snivelling,” he finally muttered, “or it will be you who is taken apart piece by piece. Return to General Murdock and tell him that if the scoundrels turn out to be kinsmen of the prisoner and he manages to slaughter them all, I will pay double the normal rate for the proof of his accomplishment,” said Mordecai as he absently resumed petting the collection of glossy human scalps that lay in his lap.

“Yes, Your Grace,” gulped the soldier. “I'll leave at first light.”

“You'll leave now,” said Mordecai, pulling his warm robe tighter about his thin shoulders.

The soldier—who was wet, hungry, bleeding and exhausted from having ridden four days without rest—staggered to his feet, bowed and murmured, “Yes, Your Grace.”

Mordecai said nothing. The soldier lingered in awkward silence for a moment or two longer until he was certain that a formal dismissal was not forthcoming, then he pulled on his cap and fled the room.

After the soldier had departed, Mordecai slouched low in his chair and let his head fall forward in order to relieve the strain on his aching neck.

Then, in a sudden fit of fury, he flung the collection of human scalps into the fire. As he watched it writhe and twist in the flames, he cursed the loss of the prisoner whose dungeon accommodations had been prepared for a fortnight, ever since Mordecai had first learned that a family of Gypsies had been discovered masquerading as Erok lowborns in one of the northern prefectures. The report he'd received on the matter had said that only a single member of the family still lived—a child too young to have yet taken the mark of his tribe. The mark had been plain to see on the stripped corpses of his parents and older siblings, however, so when General Murdock arrived in the village, he'd paid the family's neighbours handsomely for their scalps and set out to bring the
child—a boy—back to Mordecai so that he could attempt to tap into the fabled healing power of the child's blood.

Now the child was gone, and while it was possible that lowborns had attacked the camp in retaliation for the hangings, the “strange sleep” described by the soldier smacked of Gypsy trickery. Moreover, Gypsies alone had a reason for wanting to save the child.

Gypsies.

Oh, how Mordecai
hated
the Gypsies.

Though they were sly, they were not as sly as the repulsive little Gorgishmen of the west, the former lords of the Mines of Torodania who now toiled as slaves deep within the mines' dark and dangerous shafts. Nor were they as uncouth and stubborn as the hulking Khan of the mountains with their long, dirty hair and the stink of their precious woolly sheep ever upon them. And they certainly weren't as despicably meek as the Marinese, who, after having delivered a handful of their most gifted artisans into slavery each year in exchange for the rest of them being left in peace, had eventually abandoned their ancestral village on the eastern seaboard without a fight anyway.

No, the reason Mordecai hated the Gypsies was that every last one of them was blessed with preternatural health and vitality—that and the fact that their long-dead clansman Balthazar had refused to tell him the location of the healing Pool of Genezing.

Like every child in Glyndoria, Mordecai had grown up hearing some version of the legend of the pool. On frigid winter nights as he'd huddled, shivering and neglected, in the corner of the filthy lowborn shack in which he'd been
born, he'd often listened to his mother tell his stronger, better-loved brothers how the Gypsies believed their kind had once lived a settled life in a beautiful paradise in which there existed a miraculous pool whose waters could cure any ill. How the Gypsies would supposedly be living there yet if one among them had not spilled the blood of a trusted companion at the water's edge, tainting the pool and causing it to dry up; how they'd been a wandering people ever since, an echo of the healing power of the pool coursing through their veins—and burning in their hearts, the belief that their sacred pool would one day reappear.