Magician’s End (6 page)

As had his son. Ty Hawkins, son of Eye of the Blue-Winged Teal and a nameless soldier of Olasko, adopted by Tal and loved as his own, was by nature and training his father’s son. By an odd quirk of circumstance, he resembled his adopted father, with vivid blue eyes and a lithe frame and whipcord strength. The most striking difference was his sandy-blonde hair, contrasting with his father’s near-black. But like many boys, he had adopted so many of his father’s mannerisms and expressions. At times it was impossible to remember Tal was not his true father.

Jim watched Ty in conversation with Hal and found it ironic that the man he most trusted to protect the royal cousin was not even a true citizen of the Kingdom. Still, both father and son had provided valuable service to the Kingdom, Roldem, and occasionally the Conclave of Shadows.

It was the duke who spoke loud enough for the entire table to hear clearly. ‘If I may …’ Everyone fell silent. He looked around the table and said, ‘It dawns on me that with the exception of young Hawkins here, our families are intimately linked, while we are still relative strangers to one another.’ He raised his goblet of wine in the direction of the three brothers. ‘You three are the last of the conDoin line. While others have royal blood, only you three carry the name. My grandson and I descend from a name far less noble – Jamison – founded by a rogue and scoundrel, raised up to nobility by your many-greats-uncle. Both put two things above all else: duty and honour. Let us drink to their memory. Prince Arutha conDoin and James – the only man in history to be both Duke of Krondor and Rillanon; Jimmy the Hand!’

They drank and then the duke said, ‘This may be the end of us all, but not of the Kingdom if I have a damn thing to say about it.’

Ty nodded and shouted, ‘Hear! Hear!’

Hal looked at the old duke, glanced at his grandson, then simply asked, ‘What would you have us do?’

‘Many things, young Hal,’ said Lord James. ‘Eventually you’ll need to get married and father some sons, so that your name will continue. And perhaps one of them will rule here one day.’ He held up his hand. ‘And, one last time, Hal: no more mention of Lord Martin’s foolish, if noble, claim. It has no validity. And you need to retake your duchy. The Far Coast may be in chaos, but it is still king’s land. As I told you on the day of Gregory’s funeral, you need to find an ally, either Chadwick or Montgomery, and convince him of your loyalty to his cause in exchange for his loyalty to yours – the retaking of Crydee.’ James paused. ‘You’ll be lying, of course, because since the day that Crydee was lost, so much has changed.’ He glanced at a window, and everyone in the room knew he was speaking of Oliver’s army camped beyond the city. They had expected Prince Oliver to arrive with a retinue to press his claim, not an army. That changed everything.

As if reading their collective minds, James added, ‘And you must ensure that somehow Edward is crowned here, not that snake Oliver. We may have to persuade Edward to put himself forward as king, rather than backing Chadwick or Montgomery.’ He pointed at Hal. ‘You may be the deciding factor if he knows the fate of the Far Coast and probably much of Yabon, rests on this. You may very well be the one to tip the balance and save this nation.’

He sat back and sighed. ‘But to do any of that, you must, of course, stay alive.’

Jim nodded. ‘I’ll see that he does, Grandfather.’

Duke James put down his goblet and stood up. ‘Then I’ll bid you a good night and advise you this: outside this room there are few you can trust. Ensure you take wise counsel and be cautious of honeyed words laced with poison.’ He nodded to the brothers and Ty, then left the room.

As if by silent instruction, the other guests rose and one by one bid Hal, his brothers, and Jim good night. When the last was gone, only those five and the servants remained.

Jim looked around. ‘Another drink?’

No one objected, so the servants filled their goblets, and they partook of a particularly good wine, but the mood in the room could hardly be called festive.

Jim waved for the servants to depart. When they had gone, he said, ‘Ty knows what I’m about to share with you three.’ He glanced from face to face. ‘I am a loyal servant of the Crown, but I also work with the Conclave of Shadows, and you’d never heard of them until Ruffio told you of them for a reason. What I know, what I’m telling you, is because my loyalty, and yours at the moment, must extend beyond the borders of our nation. I tell you this because I trust the woman in charge of Roldem’s intelligence apparatus more at this moment than half the nobles in our Congress of Lords. I trust a few Keshians as well. But mostly I trust the dedication of the Conclave to the preservation of our entire world.

‘The recent conflict with Kesh was pointless.’

Martin seemed to be on the verge of speaking, but thought better of it.

‘It’s easy to get caught up in events without considering real causes. Kesh and the Kingdom had been at peace for a very long time, since a misguided adventure when they sought to take control of Krondor after the invasion of the Emerald Queen’s army. Since then there’s been the usual poking around in the Vale of Dreams and the occasional ship battle when one captain got a little too ambitious. But today we have half the Keshian army spread out along the Far Coast and mustered along their northern border to protect against a Kingdom retaliation; the Kingdom army either here on Rillanon protecting this very palace, or in Salador, or mustered in the Fields of Albalyn; most of the Kingdom fleet surrounding this island; the Keshian fleet at the bottom of the ocean; and Roldem’s fleet in a defensive position around their island. What do you think that means?’

Martin said, ‘That we went through a pointless exercise?’

Jim nodded. ‘Yes. What else?’

It was Brendan who answered. ‘No one is where they’re supposed to be.’

‘Exactly.’

Hal said, ‘So if another threat materializes, no one is in the correct position to deal with it.’

Martin calculated, then said, ‘The West.’

Jim nodded. ‘Yes.’

‘I need to get back to Crydee!’ said Hal.

‘No,’ said Jim. ‘You need to stay here until my grandfather tells you to go somewhere else. Most likely to Prince Edward.’ He looked at Martin and Brendan. ‘You must return to Ylith and explain to the Keshian commander that he’s in the way and you need to go poking around. My intelligence tells me you’ve got a reasonable chance to have him agree for the right bribe – he is Keshian, after all, as long as you only go with a small patrol. If he doesn’t, you need to find a clever way to get around his objections without starting another war out there. Sneaking past his line should prove little trouble to a couple of bright lads like you.

‘But you need to get into the Far Coast, north of the garrisons at Carse and Tulan, so my best guess is somewhere near the taredhel and that city they’re building, perhaps near the dwarves.’

‘Who?’ asked Brendan. ‘Besides Keshian Dog Soldiers and elves and dwarves, who would be there?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Jim. ‘That’s what I need your brother and you to find out.’

The brothers spent a long night with Jim Dasher discussing as much of the political situation with Great Kesh as could be extrapolated from what Martin and Brendan had seen during the defence of the city and after. They matched what they had seen with reports from the West that had reached the king’s court, which in this case meant Jim Dasher’s personal attention.

The long and short of it was that it was a mess. Kesh had withdrawn to the ancient borders of Bosania, so a few miles of road to the west of the City of Ylith were open to the crest of the foothills of the Grey Towers Mountains, as well as the southwest highway, leading to the Free Cities which were still currently occupied by Kesh.

By the time they were finished examining all their options and what needed to be done, the sun was rising in the east. Martin was convinced Jim Dasher was perhaps the cleverest man he had ever met, or at least the most cunning. And Martin was also convinced that Jim was correct: the entire war with Kesh and the plot behind it was designed to put both the Kingdom of the Isles and the Empire of Great Kesh at a military disadvantage in the Far West.

No military action of any kind could quickly be mounted should a threat arise in the Duchy of Crydee or the Free Cities, or the Grey Towers Mountains. It might take days, or even weeks, for news of any outbreak of trouble in the west to reach Prince Edward on the Fields of Albalyn, and if he instantly dispatched some of the western lords’ commands to answer, it would be weeks before they reached any site of trouble. And that was dependent on being able to spare men with the possibility of a military confrontation with Prince Oliver looming. By sunrise, Jim and the brothers were convinced the Far Coast and the Western Realm were as defenceless as a day-old kitten.

Martin was a student of history and it didn’t take him more than an hour of looking at suggested Keshian deployment in the Far Coast and Free Cities to come to the same conclusion as Jim. The safest location from any counterattacks from the combined armies of the Kingdom of the Isles and the Empire of Great Kesh that wasn’t on the bottom of some ocean or one of the moons, was in the centre of the Grey Towers Mountains; very close to the site of the original Tsurani rift into Midkemia.

As the cock crowed in the distance, the three looked at the now-empty carafe of coffee and wordlessly exchanged the shared opinion that they had reached a conclusion. ‘The Grey Towers,’ said Martin. ‘Neither Kesh nor the Kingdom nor the Free Cities can answer the kind of threat the Tsurani posed when they arrived …’

‘Where the Star Elves are building their city,’ continued Brendan.

Jim rose. ‘Well, the sun’s up and we’ve beaten this topic to death. It’s time to move and I think we’d best be getting on with it. It’s still before dawn in Krondor so you—’ he indicated Martin and Brendan, ‘—can still be leaving there at sunrise, once we get you there.’ To Hal he said, ‘You need some rest. You’re going to have to withstand a lot of charm, guile, and bald-faced lies before we’re done, but I’ll be at your side most of the time and your best course of action is to nod and say you’ll consider what’s been suggested. Edward’s enemies are not all on the field under arms. There are a lot of poisoned tongues still in the palace.’

Hal embraced his brothers and bade them a safe journey.

Jim took Martin and Brendan with him through a palace that was never truly asleep, as servants scurried to ensure that every resident’s needs were met before dawn.

Reaching Jim’s personal quarters, they entered a tidy office adjacent to his sleeping room and he quickly set about penning a travel document. He signed it with a flourish, poured wax and applied a seal to it.

‘Isn’t that the duke’s signet?’ asked Brendan.

‘It’s a twin,’ said Jim. ‘My grandfather gave it to me to reduce his own need to sign things; he finds it annoying.’

‘And did you just sign his name?’ said Martin.

‘Of course,’ said Jim as if this was quite normal. ‘Wait here.’

A short time later, he returned with a woman of middle years, with greying dark hair, and a no-nonsense demeanour. ‘This is Gretchen. She will take you where you need to go.’

Before Martin or Brendan could speak, Gretchen reached out and seized their wrists and suddenly they were in a different room. ‘Krondor,’ she said, and vanished.

Apparently the comings and goings of magicians in what was revealed as Jim Dasher’s private suite in Krondor were commonplace enough that the palace guards did not react when two men unexpectedly walked out of a room that had been empty only moments before.

The brothers had been in Krondor only twice before: a leisurely visit to Prince Edward’s court when Martin had been small (Brendan had still been a baby), and their hurried visit on the way to Rillanon just weeks before.

‘What now?’ said Brendan.

Martin shrugged. ‘Find someone in charge, I suppose.’

It took the better part of an hour to find the acting city commander, a man named Falston Jennings, hastily elevated from the rank of prince’s squire to baronet of the court, so that he could lawfully be considered a noble. He was obviously in over his head and anxious to see if what he said made sense to the brothers from Crydee, especially as they had introduced themselves as ‘Princes Martin and Brendan, the late king’s cousins’.

They had endured Jennings’s near-babbling conversation over as informal a break fast meal as the palace had likely seen in a century, for many of the key servants had travelled east with Prince Edward, attending his baggage-train and pavilion to ensure his comfort on the journey to Rillanon.

Martin left that meal with a jumble of facts he could barely make sense of, let alone organize into coherent intelligence. Brendan had been amused by the entire course of events, but of the three brothers he was the one most easily amused.

From what they could get from Jennings’s ramble, Kesh had withdrawn her ships to a point behind an imaginary line extending from a point halfway between Land’s End and Durbin in the south to the border between the Free Cities and the Kingdom, in the north. Kingdom ships were given free passage up to Sarth, but no captain dared sail farther north as the island kingdom of Queg had declared a state of emergency – a pretext for them to board and seize any ship that sailed ‘too close’ to their imagined ‘sphere of influence’, which at the moment meant from their beach to ankle-deep water on the Kingdom shore north of Sarth.

The Free Cities were essentially Keshian garrisons at the moment, and no ship had arrived from there since the truce had been declared. Also, no Free Cities ship in Krondor or Port Vykor was willing to attempt a run home, as their captains had no idea what to expect from their new masters. In sum, three fleets choked the waterways of the Bitter Sea, all ready for a fight at a moment’s notice, so Martin’s only recourse had been horseback.

After their hasty meal, Jennings led Martin and Brendan to the marshalling yard, where a patrol of Krondorian regulars waited. ‘Sergeant Oaks,’ said Jennings, ‘this is Prince Martin, the late king’s cousin.’