Queen of Demons (47 page)

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Authors: David Drake

BOOK: Queen of Demons
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He raised his head from the hollow of the dinghy and looked at Cozro. In a voice that grated with controlled anger, Cashel said, “You were headed for the island. You go ahead and paddle there now. My friends and I will watch.”
Cozro nodded, swallowed, and began lashing the water
with his hands. He probably thought that if Cashel got angry enough, he'd find the strength for anything he chose to do.
Cashel thought he was right.
G
arric rested his head on his hands, feeling as tired as he'd ever been. Rural labor was sometimes backbreaking and often brutally long—harvesting went on from dawn to the dusk of long summer days, because the next morning might bring rain.
What he felt now was a sort of mental exhaustion, though, that was completely different but no less punishing. For the past ten hours, he hadn't been out of his chair.
He smiled faintly. That wasn't quite true. He'd used the close chest in an alcove off this room, the queen's former reception hall and now his office. Liane had suggested it was more politic for Garric to make his headquarters in the queen's mansion rather than Royhas' town house.
“The next petitioner is Nimir bor-Nummerman, a landholder from the Routan Peninsula, that's on the west of the island,” Liane said, holding the wax tablet on which she'd jotted notes at a slant to the three-wick oil lamp. “He told me he was here simply to offer loyalty on behalf of his district, but Tadai says that he's in an inheritance struggle with his two half-brothers.”
“We may still want to support him,” Garric muttered into his hands. “His brothers could have gotten the inheritance through the queen. May the Lady guide my steps!”
Garric hadn't thought so often about the Great Gods since he was a little boy watching the Tithe Procession.
Priests from Carcosa drew carts with giant statues of the Lady and the Shepherd around the borough annually, collecting the temples' due. Garric knew now that the images were only painted wood, but their colored silk robes and gilt accoutrements looked dazzlingly divine to eyes that hadn't seen much of the world.
Now he thought about the Gods because he needed to believe there were powers who understood the things that he did not.
“Shall I send him in?” Liane said. Royhas—any of the conspirators—would have provided Garric with an experienced secretary who already knew the ins and outs of Ornifal politics. Liane was a better choice. Garric could trust her to have her first loyalty to the same things he was loyal to, fuzzy though the concepts were.
Garric rubbed his temples. “Liane,” he said, “I don't think I can talk to anybody else today.”
He took a swig of water laced with citrus juice from a jug decorated with a pair of heroes fighting winged demons. It was Sandrakkan ware, red figures on a black background rather than black on cream as was the convention here on Ornifal.
He looked up and smiled at Liane. She'd bought all the office furnishings the day before. “Has the shipper you found to take the letter arrived yet?”
“His name's Ansulf,” she said, rising. “I don't think so but I'll check the waiting room. Shall I tell the others you won't see anyone else today?”
“Would you?” Garric said. Of course, the petitioners would be back tomorrow, along with hundreds of other people who thought they had something to gain from Garric or-Reise. “I haven't written the letter yet. I …”
“I'll leave you alone,” Liane said, responding to the request he hadn't voiced. He needed some time to himself; to himself and Carus. “When Ansulf arrives, I'll knock on the door. All right?”
Garric nodded. Prince Garric, he supposed he was. It made his stomach knot to think of that.
Lady, please guide
my steps,
he whispered as the door closed softly behind Liane.
He walked to the window. The street beyond had been dark for hours. The other conspirators were busy in the work of government—Royhas, Tadai, and Waldron were, at any rate. Pitre should be contacting the king to arrange a meeting, and Sourous was supposedly arranging an assembly of the city's trade guilds. His family controlled the Ornifal cloth trade. Royhas said that whatever one thought of Sourous himself, his staff was excellent.
No matter how good an underling was, and even if the underling was a noble who traced his lineage back two thousand years, there were going to be people who insisted on dealing with the man in charge. Garric groaned. Things were going to be awful when he really was in charge.
He leaned on the window ledge and grinned tiredly. He let his mind go blank, then slipped into the reverie that brought him to the side of King Carus.
Below them was a crowded plaza bordered by monumental buildings. Garric thought he recognized the temple in front of him, though only three of the six high columns still stood in the Carcosa of the present day.
“The temple of the Shepherd Who Guards the Kingdom?” he said.
Carus nodded.
“That's my adoption ceremony,” Carus said. “King Carilan adopted me as his son and heir presumptive. I was only a second cousin. He had closer kin, but he and his advisors thought I'd provide the strong hand necessary to hold the kingdom together in a time of rising stresses.”
Smoke rose from the altar built on a low platform midway up the temple steps. Priests and courtiers in gold and varicolored robes of state stood to either side. Carilan and the teenaged Carus, kneeling before him, wore the bleached white wool of ancient formality.
“How do
you
like being king, lad?” Carus asked with a grin.
“I hate it,” Garric said flatly. “The people I'm dealing with now are the ones who're so desperate that they're coming to me because they couldn't get redress from Valence.”
He laughed without humor and added, “Or much of anything else from Valence, apparently. Royhas says the king hadn't been seen in public for six months, though occasionally he'll call in somebody to assign a special task. The way he told Royhas to murder me, for example.”
Carus nodded, his face no longer smiling. “You say you hate it, lad,” he said bitterly. “I hated all the business of governing so much that I looked for excuses not to do it. Any excuse would do, but going on campaign was the best one. That's what I'd been made king for, wasn't it? To be a strong hand!”
Carilan was a slender man who looked seventy years old, though Garric knew from Adiler's
History
that the king was barely fifty though in bad health. In the vision below, Carilan took a massive gold ring from the middle finger of his left hand and placed it on Carus' finger while the youth continued to kneel.
“The ring weighed half a pound,” Carus said, shaking his head in bemused memory. “It was only worn at these ceremonies. It disappeared when Dalopan pirates sacked Carcosa after my fleet and I sank. I suppose some slave hammered the ring into foil to cover the throne of a king with bones through his nose.”
“But you were crowned to be a strong hand, weren't you?” Garric asked, troubled by the anger he'd heard in the voice of a king who laughed even in situations where others ran screaming. “You had to be.”
“I had to be,” Carus said, “but I had to be more than that. And I wasn't. If the only tool you have is an axe, then you turn all your problems into trees to be chopped.”
He shook his head, wistful but no longer angry. “I told the lords of Ornifal that I'd harry their island from one end to the other if they didn't stop bribing my enemies to
spare Ornifal's trade. What was I thinking of? Why couldn't I see what would happen, the way I understand it now?”
“They stopped sending taxes to Carcosa?” Garric guessed. “Because they thought they'd just be braiding a rope for you to hang them with?”
“And
they doubled the subsidies they were paying under the table to the Earls of Cordin and Blaise,” Carus agreed ruefully. “Figuring if they were ready to revolt, I wouldn't dare take my fleet across the Inner Sea to Valles.”
“But you did,” Garric said. On the temple steps, Carilan raised Carus by the hand. They stood, their arms lifted together. Underpriests came carefully up the steps leading a garlanded bullock with gilt horns. “You crossed the sea to crush the Duke of Yole.”
“I wasn't the only one who could miscalculate,” Carus said, grim again. “I figured it could smash Yole with a surprise attack, hang a dozen nobles in Valles on my way back, and then deal with Blaise and Cordin. It might have worked. Moving faster than the other man expects wins campaigns as surely as it does duels, lad.”
“Only the Duke of Yole had a wizard,” Garric said. He thought of the Hooded One, standing in black majesty as the world crumbled about him. “Or the other way around, perhaps.”
“Either way, they put paid to me and my fleet,” Carus said. “
And
the kingdom,
and
all society higher than three huts together and an ox to plow with. If it hadn't been Yole, it would have been another place I overreached, using my sword when I should have used my tongue.”
A priest brought a spike-headed hammer down on the bullock's forehead. The animal kicked out in a death spasm, then collapsed on the platform. An underpriest drew a gilded knife across the beast's throat while another priest caught the blood in a flat bowl.
Blood sacrifice had disappeared in the poverty following the collapse of the Old Kingdom. Garric was just as
glad it hadn't returned as wealth increased during the ensuing millennium. Pans of hot, fresh blood had nothing to do with the Lady he envisioned, and wanton slaughter was even more alien to a Shepherd's duties.
“I made enemies of the Ornifal nobles,” Carus said softly, “when all they'd been before were fools. Though not so great a fool as I, to think my sword could solve all my problems. You'll do better, lad. You're doing better already.”
The scene below them was dissolving. From far away Garric heard the sharp tap of Liane's bronze stylus on the door. “Master Ansulf is here,” her voice whispered.
“But for the problems that do need a sword,” said Carus, smiling again, “they'll find there's a strong hand on the throne to swing one. By the Shepherd and the honor of Haft, they will!”
Garric was alone in a high-ceilinged room of the queen's mansion. The stone under his palms was polished alabaster, as cool and smooth as the visage of the queen as she fled Valles two days before. A night breeze blew through the open casement. On the streets below, linkmen guided a happy group who were caroling about sunshine and freedom.
“Bring him in please, Liane,” Garric said, turning from the window. He still hadn't written the letter.
He sat at the desk but smiled over his shoulder in greeting to Liane and the man with her. Ansulf was blond and sallow. His tunics, the inner one hanging a hand's breadth beneath the outer, were of Ornifal style and bore Ornifal embroidery, but the man himself was from Cordin or just possibly Tisamur.
“Master Ansulf,” Garric said as he dipped and wiped his pen nib, “forgive my delay. I'll have this for you in a moment.”
Ansulf had spent most of his adult life in the service of Serian merchants. The Serians, separate by both culture and religion from the rest of the Isles' population, were always viewed askance and often the subject of persecution.
Their industry, craftsmanship, and business acumen made them more, not less, hated.
Serians were nonviolent as a matter of religion and used pygmy cannibals from their isle's highlands to guard their ships and buildings in the outer world. In much the same way they hired men like Ansulf to act as business agents where native Serians would be robbed or killed. Liane's family had used Serian bankers, and it was through that contact that she had found the messenger Garric required.
Garric wrote in the swift, neat hand his father had taught him:
If you are well, it is good. I also am well.
In this place I have some friends and many who call themselves my friends. If the Gods permit, I will tomorrow be a prince and will act in all ways as though I held the office of King of the Isles. I have an abundance of people who say they can teach me to run a kingdom; but I have a palace to staff and run as well, and there is no one here whom I trust to do that for me.
I need you. The bearer of this letter will provide whatever funds and facilities you request for the journey. I cannot overstate the dangers you will face, but there is no one else whom I can ask. I hope you will come at once.
Garric or-Reise
Given at Valles on Ornifal, the Queen's house.
Garric folded the letter into three crosswise. He wrote the address on the flat side, then turned the document and reached for one of the candles to seal the folded edge with wax. He paused, then opened the letter again and blotted
or-Reise
from his signature. Above his given name he wrote in tiny script,
Your loving son.
Only then did he seal the letter and give it to Ansulf.
The shipper looked at the document with professional appraisal, then tucked it into a pouch whose leather was
stiffened by iron wire. “I've discussed the anchorage with merchants who know the district, Your Lordship,” he said.
“At Barca's Hamlet?” Garric said in surprise. “There isn't an anchorage. I mean, not for anything bigger than a fishing boat.”

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