Cobweb Empire (10 page)

The captured girls and women of all ranks
were led—and in some cases dragged—through the snow and brought
back to the Chidair Keep and the surrounding town, and imprisoned
all over the place. And rumor had it, they were eventually all
going to end up very badly.

Those men of Chidair who were not dead,
cowered in fear, and tried to keep away from direct contact with
their dead Duke as much as possible, for they actively feared for
their lives. They too patrolled the northern forestlands
reluctantly, for they had no choice but to obey. But more and more
of them secretly took up their families and households and left the
Keep and the town quietly.

Even the Duke’s own son, Lord Beltain
Chidair, known in the countryside as the terrifying black knight,
had deserted his father, riding off with a small detachment of
soldiers on patrol and never returning. Apparently, when Beltain
did not come home the first night after his patrol duty, it was
assumed that he was simply occupied or lost, but soon enough the
various scouts came back with strong rumors that he and his fellow
deserters were seen on the road heading south into Goraque
territory.

At first, Hoarfrost did not believe it. The
first man who came to report this news, suffered a blow to the
head, and was killed immediately, then picked himself and his
leaking brains up from the floor, and stumbled his way out of his
liege’s chamber.

The next two men to confirm this in
Hoarfrost’s presence, were both dead already. They had elected to
go in together, and even they shrank away in terror at the
thunderous voice of their liege lord upraised in curses and
periodically broken by breath being drawn like creaking bellows,
followed by crashing metal and breaking furniture.

The only thing that seemed to have a
mellowing effect on the Duke’s rage was a young lady, one of the
few captured high aristocrats from the Silver Court, who was cool
and impassive and who was also a self-admitted spy on behalf of the
Domain.

Lady Ignacia Chitain of Balmue, had been
captured by Hoarfrost himself on one of his patrols, together with
two of her aristocratic companions, and she immediately revealed to
Hoarfrost her connection to the clandestine intrigue that he had
been a part of for many days now. A number of weeks ago, Duke
Chidair had received hand-delivered messages from couriers directly
from the Sovereign of the Domain, offering him an alliance, and
telling him to expect a visit from a secret agent of the Domain. At
first he had taken it for foolery, but then, certain events vaguely
hinted at by the missives had come to pass, and it all started to
make sense. The last message, just before Lady Ignacia’s “capture,”
was a promise of “an Alliance and Eternity.” And with death’s
cessation Hoarfrost finally knew that his time on this earth, and
his continued physical existence now depended on such an
alliance.

Armed with this certainty, Hoarfrost
reluctantly decided to listen to the young lady. She was
immediately treated with honor, housed in fine quarters, and
separated from her two former friends who were given much less
pleasing accommodations under lock and key. The latter—Lady
Amaryllis Roulle and Lord Nathan Woult—had been the most brilliant
young members of the scandalous set at Court, and—together with
Ignacia—the three had called themselves the League of Folly. Now,
the League was broken, Ignacia revealed as a foreign spy and
traitor to the Realm, and her friends were locked in a cold,
crudely-furnished country chamber not worthy of Imperial serving
staff, much less nobles of the Silver Court.

At present, as Hoarfrost had to somehow
ingest the news of his son’s betrayal, and before he destroyed the
entire Keep with his fury, Lady Ignacia had taken it upon herself
to pacify him.

Thus, as Hoarfrost strode through his
unfortunate corridor and wrecked everything around him, a
voluptuous well-dressed lady in a sage green dress, with a tiny
cinched waist, with an abundance of auburn hair that was presently
confined and pinned up into an artful sculptured hairdo, followed
quietly in his footsteps, just a length of corridor out of sight,
waiting for the best opportunity to approach him.

The Duke raged his way up another flight of
well-worn circling stairs into a turret of old crumbling stone in
the oldest portion of the Keep. And the lady followed, always
keeping to one flight below, stepping lightly and soundlessly, and
glancing with distaste at the crumbling antique ruin around her
that was not merely this sorry wing but indeed could have been said
of the majority of Chidair Keep. At some point, as she carefully
stepped over a torn length of ancestral tapestry that possibly cost
a fortune and had just been ripped off its hanger—the venerable
antique depicting faded stars, fleur-de-lis, and curling vines on a
verdigris and night sky background—she felt the icy gusts of winter
wind above her. And thus she knew the Duke had reached the top.

She emerged behind him carefully but
relentlessly, and stepped into deep virgin snow. The battlements
here were deserted, and she saw only a few deep footprints sunken
in the snowdrifts, before her gaze encountered the great shape of
Hoarfrost. He stood just a few steps away, near the crenellated
parapet wall, leaning into the wind that was whipping his hair and
the tatters of his damaged surcoat.

Ignacia looked up, shivering, pulling her
skirts closer about her, and regretted not bringing a shawl. But
then, it would have covered the splendid cleavage that she had
meant to use to its fullest advantage—all that cream-and-lilies
rosy flesh bursting from the courtly neckline of her velvet
dress. . . .

Overhead was a white winter sky with a faint
blue haze, a scrolling dream. A faint mass of darker clouds rode
low on the horizon to one side—she was unsure if she was facing
north or east—and the bleak sun was just past zenith. Beyond the
walls were short thatched snow-laden roofs of an impoverished town,
scattered haphazardly, and farther yet, among the whiteness, the
dark trees of the northern forest, surrounding them on all sides,
all along the haze of the horizon.

Where Hoarfrost stood, just a few paces
away, the wall rose even higher, and there was a spot where a pole
was fashioned, and upon it rode an old weathered banner, snapping
in the gusts and rimed with snow. It had once been pale blue, with
the heraldic symbol of Chidair and an Imperial strip of black and
silver, with a gold and red fringe of Allegiance to the Realm. Now
the colors had faded into whiteness, and only the shape of the
embroidery remained to mark the insignias, sprinkled by snow. The
Imperial fringe too was no longer true gilt and red but a washed
out yellow and rust, while the black and silver strip had faded to
muddled grey. No one had bothered to replace it, not in decades,
for the remotely situated Chidair with their crude warring ways and
their godforsaken wilderness were indeed little better than
savages. . . .

Lady Igancia took another step in the snow,
placing her tiny foot in the already existing massive footprint
made by the giant man before her. She straightened and called out
to the Duke.

“Your Grace! May I join you?”

Hoarfrost turned around slowly, swiveling
his barrel torso. And his tangle-haired, dirty, dead face was a
garish mask of horrors, starting with the round glassy eyes,
permanently open wide in a glare. “What the devil?” he hissed in
unrepressed fury, then immediately stilled. “Oh it’s you, little
ladybird. . . . Come to watch the damned father
curse his thrice-damned whelp of a son, are you? What the hell do
you want now?” He ended on a far calmer note however, and his fixed
eye-marbles were trained upon her, taking in the sight of her.

Ignacia smiled and gave him a deep lingering
curtsy, leaning forward intentionally far more than courtly
protocol dictated, so that her chest fairly strove against the
velvet neckline. What a sly little thing she was, and how
differently she acted now that the tedious pretence enacted for the
Silver Court was over.
There
she had played the bland ninny
and the ingénue, playing second fiddle to Amaryllis, her
raven-haired beautiful “friend,” and always fading into the
background, making herself insipid and idiotic for the sake of her
assignment, and patiently biding her true nature and her time.

But here, she was no longer constrained, and
instead was engaging her main role and skilled function as adept
seductress.

And as seductress, her gaze was direct, full
of brilliance, and her eyes bore into whomever she addressed with a
force of many suns.

“I want to know, Your Grace, if you have
received any more new messages from the Sovereign.”

“I might have, had I bothered to know about
the damned things!” His voice exploded in a sudden acceleration of
gears turning a great rusted piece of machinery. “My mind has been
on other matters, such as a certain runt from my own litter—” and
he bashed his right fist against the top of the nearest snow-capped
wall—“who has gone off and left his father and abandoned his filial
duty—may he be cursed for eternity—”

“My condolences,” she interrupted in a
steady voice, never taking her gaze off his face, as he turned
about this way and that, raining his fists down upon the tops of
the crenels and merlons that interspersed the walls, and scattering
snow. “But it might encourage you to know that your forsworn son
will meet his retribution at your hands soon enough, as Her
Brilliance’s plan is enacted on this side of the world. The part
that you must play will be divulged shortly. Do not turn away any
messenger, not even in this bitter hour of your
familial . . . loss.”

“Loss, you say? It is not a loss but a
calamity!
Chidair is done with! I had but one son, and now I
have none! No son of mine will bear progeny, no more little whelps
running around the stones here, and thus the long honorable line of
Chidair comes to an end!”

He glared in strange stilled madness, a
colossus of a mad god fixed in the raving moment of his highest
point of passion. Hs frozen jaw drawn, his teeth bared with
difficulty, he was close to bursting into an avalanche of
stone.

But the living sight of her, radiating so
much repressed energy, so much creamy
living
flesh, that
great thick mass of up-swept fiery hair, soothed him yet again,
even if for a moment.

“It may seem a calamity indeed, and yet,
Chidair does not have to end,” she said. “
You
are Chidair.
And as a vassal of the Sovereign, you will remain Chidair for as
long as this firmament stands beneath your feet.”

Hoarfrost exhaled one long shuddering
breath, with a hiss of broken ice and winter.

“Such pretty things you
say. . . .”

He approached her, moving his legs like
thick tree-trunks, and stopped, towering over her. She watched him
steadily, and did not move back, not even an inch.

And her lips were set in that interim place
between a smile and nothing, where the curves of her cheeks
quivered into hollows at the corners of her mouth. She did not
smile just yet, waiting for him to say something else.

And he did.

“Such pretty things . . .” he
repeated, his monstrous face near her own. Had he been living, his
panting breath might have washed over her cheeks.

“The message,” she repeated. “You will
receive a message with instructions to gather your forces and
advance.”

“Is that so, comely lady? And where should
this old rotting carcass advance?”

In that moment she smiled, deeply, allowing
the dimples to bloom forth and her plump lips to shape themselves
into irresistible things.

“South,” she said. Her gaze slithered
downward demurely, and his fixed eye-marbles could not turn in
their sockets, so he craned his neck down slowly, until he was
staring directly at the globes of her breasts rising gently against
green velvet with each breath.

She was boundless, compelling; the sight of
her evoked rolling waves upon the ocean.

“I am a dead man,” he said, quieter than
anything he uttered all day. “Unfortunately, little bird, all I can
do is advance my armies. But I see, that is what you intended to
say?”

“It is all I intended to say, Your Grace.
South, to Letheburg.”

She continued to smile.

And the dead man recalled for a
moment—through the layers of his suspended distance, past the
unresponsive flesh—what it had been like to be alive.

T
heir room was
small, perpetually dark, filthy, and unheated, complained Lady
Amaryllis Roulle, a slim elegant beauty, standing in a monastic
chamber of bare stone before a small arch window that had the view
of nothing but peasant rooftops and a bleak sky.

The young man, Lord Nathan Woult, seated on
one of the two thin cots moved against each opposite wall, raised
his own pale thoughtful face that he’d been holding between his
hands. “Ah, my dear,” he said, “how I would kill for an herbed
chicken cutlet, dressed in Burgundy and fennel sauce. . .
and a goblet of rosy-gold summer wine!”

“Fie, my dear, if you could kill, I would
suggest you start with something or someone else, far less
delectable.”

“Killing, even if one
could
manage to
do it these days, requires a modicum of effort. Purportedly, one is
required to lift a finger; maybe even flex a wrist. I suppose I
will have to console myself instead with sipping icy water from
this woeful little wooden cup—or is it a miniature horse-bucket?
What would you call this thing? A trough?”

And he looked dejectedly at the floor near
his feet where a pair of small plates and cups sat directly on the
stone slabs lacking even the tiniest peasant comfort of strewn
rushes.

The man was arrogantly handsome, and of the
same high-contrast dark hair and tender pale skin combination as
the lady, which made them a fitting pair to rule the faerie court.
They could have been brother and sister, with their sharply
chiseled, perfect features—he with lean angular lines and she with
delicate polished roundness. And yet they were unrelated, and
unattached, except for bonds of courtly friendship and a mutually
shared sarcastic disposition. As a social threesome with Lady
Ignacia Chitain, they had been the League of Folly at the Silver
Court, and rained barbs of wickedness upon the entirety of
le
haut monde
.