The Fall of The Kings (Riverside) (4 page)

For all four men, the meeting had been a momentous one. The three young scholars had found a shrewd mentor; Rugg had found three kindred spirits. He was not surprised when each of them had resisted the world’s call for educated men to stock its law courts and schoolrooms, its nobles’ secretarial staffs and charitable institutions. Elton, Cassius, and finally St Cloud remained at University, become Fellows and then Doctors of their chosen subjects, and had been licensed to lecture by the Governors. The four of them had become a familiar sight: Basil St Cloud of History, sturdy and pale, with perennially stubbled cheeks and black, unruly hair; Thomas Elton of Astronomy, stocky and cheerful; Lucas Cassius of Mathematics, lean and saturnine; and Leonard Rugg of Metaphysics, not nearly as old as he pretended to be, his skin pink, his forehead high, his thinning reddish hair standing out from his scalp like new-shorn fleece.

“Time marches on,” Rugg was saying testily to Cassius, “but the boy with the brandy is slower than a tart with a noble client. And didn’t you say young St Cloud and Elton were coming?”

“On their way,” the mathematician answered. “Remember, patience is the virtue of the truly wise.”

Rugg snorted. “Nonsense. Patience gets you nothing but a cold bed. Who’s been filling your head with platitudes, eh? Your old mother?”

“Placid,” Cassius said smugly, “in his
Of Manners and
Morals
. I remember you lecturing on it, Leonard. You were, of course, much more eloquent at the time.”

“Don’t you quote Placid to me, you damned cabbage-counter. Always thought Placid was a damned fool,” Rugg said, “when he wasn’t being a genius. Ah, here’s the brandy!”

Easing a laden tray onto the table, the potboy unloaded two steaming jugs, four heavy pottery mugs, and several little dishes containing sugar and spices. Rugg pushed back his bench, stood ponderously, cracked his knuckles and began to assemble the punch. A savor of cinnamon and cloves rose above the table in an alcoholic cloud.

“Is that brandy-punch I smell?” Elton said brightly, looming over them.

“It will be,” Rugg answered, “if you don’t jog my arm. Sit down, Elton—no, over there, with St Cloud. Basil, dear boy, where have you been hiding?”

“Nowhere I can’t be found,” Basil answered mildly, “as Elton has just happily proved.”

Cassius sighed with an exaggerated melancholy, and laced his skinny fingers in his lanky hair. “Would that all proofs were so easily made! Basil, I hear you’re writing another book, and good for you. In fact,” he caught Elton’s eye across the table, “very good for you, indeed.”

“Which means what, exactly?”

Basil’s question went unanswered as Rugg lifted the ladle high and made a brief speech about friendship and taverns and wine. Rugg favored the rhetorical style of the Gerardine metaphysicians, his current academic preoccupation. Basil cupped his hands around his steaming mug. Autumn was coming on chill this year.

The four friends toasted each other and the beginning of the Harvest Term, wishing each other plenty of paying students for all and a new, more faithful mistress for Rugg. They ordered up a dinner of roast chicken, greens, and buttered squash, and tucked into it as if they’d not eaten for days.

“The Horn Chair lecture’s back on, had you heard?” Elton asked through a mouthful of chicken.

“Impossible,” said Rugg. “The Horn Professor’s at death’s door. Has been since Midsummer.”

Cassius sipped his punch. “It’s not like you to be so far behind the gossip, Rugg. Doctor Tortua
was
at death’s door, but he’s better now. Not enough better, I’d have thought, to go about giving public lectures, but I’m no physician. You were Tortua’s man, St Cloud. What do you know about it?”

St Cloud shrugged. “Not much. We haven’t been friendly since my monograph on the Treaty of Arkenvelt.”

“I remember,” said Rugg. “You took his chapter in
The Fall
of the Kings
and made mincemeat of it, didn’t you, against all advice and common sense.”

“But he got it wrong, and all because he didn’t go back to the treaty itself and relied instead on Delgardie’s report in
A
Mirror of History,
which was already second-hand at best. As I said at the time.” He glared at Rugg, who looked ready to argue the whole point again. “It’s done, Rugg, and can’t be undone. Doctor Crabbe’s his heir apparent now, and much joy may he have of him.”

“You’re hopeless, Basil.” Elton looked over his shoulder into the Blackbird’s noisy, candlelit room. “Doesn’t Roger Crabbe drink here too?”

“I haven’t seen him,” St Cloud said. “Not since Spring Term, not here.”

“Well, his friends, then. You don’t need to like Crabbe, but there’s nothing to be gained by making an enemy of him.”

“And what would his friends tell him?” St Cloud demanded. “He already knows I don’t like him; I’ve told him as much to his face. And he’s welcome to hear that I’m sorry I quarreled with Doctor Tortua—well, not sorry, exactly, since I’d do the same again. But sad. I’d like to make it up with him.”

The eminent doctor had recognized in the young St Cloud a love of ancient things that matched his own. In Basil’s second year, he’d wooed him away from the law he’d come to the city to study and shepherded him up through University ranks. It was Tortua’s influence, as well as his own industry, that had made Basil the youngest man ever to achieve the rank of Doctor. He had loved the old man like a father, and had been proportionately wounded when Tortua had taken Basil’s monograph on the Treaty of Arkenvelt as a personal attack rather than a simple scholarly correction.

“Make it up with him!” scoffed Elton. “I doubt Tortua would even see you, especially as Crabbe’s his doorkeeper these days, they say.”

“I thought Crabbe was avoiding me,” St Cloud said.

“You flatter yourself,” said Cassius. “He was nursing Tortua.”

“Lobbying to be the next Horn Chair of Ancient History, if you ask me,” Elton said, and Rugg nodded.

“That’s disgusting,” exclaimed St Cloud. “Not even Crabbe would do a thing like that.”

His three companions exchanged the superior smiles of men who, knowing a friend’s weakness, love him in spite of it.

“So,” said Rugg after a pause, “are you still going to the lecture?”

St Cloud, with little else to stand on, stood on his dignity. “Of course I’m going. I’m in ancient history. I’d go whoever was giving the lecture, even if it were Crabbe himself.”

“We’ll see you there, then,” said Elton cheerfully.

“Yes,” said Cassius. “Sit with us. You can tell us when he’s getting it wrong.”

“You’ll just have to figure it out for yourselves,” Basil St Cloud told them. “I shall be sitting with my students.”

chapter
II

THE KINGS RULED THE UNITED KINGDOM FOR BETTER than three hundred years before they were deposed by the nobles, who established rule by the Council of Lords. The later kings had been a byword for decadence and corruption, with special emphasis on assassination, rape, and excessive taxation. Of their special councilors, the wizards, the less said the better; progress and the Council of Lords swept even their memory aside. The country prospered. Technology advanced. Carriages were invented, and the nobles left their townhouses in the Riverside district behind, seduced by the broad avenues and terraced banks of the Hill that lay across the riverbank northwest of the Old City. There they built magnificent houses set in exquisite gardens sweeping down to the river.

The lords of the city did have a tendency to quarrel amongst themselves, though, especially in the Council’s early days. There were high walls around their gardens and guards at the gates. But even these were not enough to protect a man from the fury of his peers and their relations when blood feuds heated up. To keep the important people from killing each other off, a class of professional swordsmen evolved to take on the nobles’ challenges, and elaborate rules were constructed to keep them within the bounds of law. Some of the houses still boasted the traditional liveried swordsman, but not all. Times had changed, as times will. Like the swordsmen, the walls around the Hill’s great houses were chiefly decorative. But not all. The gates of Arlen House, in particular, were not easily breached. Behind them lived and worked the Serpent Chancellor of the Council of Lords, Geoffrey, Lord Arlen. Like the serpent, he was cunning and elusive and well-defended. No one entered Arlen House except by invitation. And even then, the Serpent Chancellor was not so easily seen.

LORD NICHOLAS GALING LEANED HIS FOREHEAD against the window of Arlen House and watched the clouds rolling away over the river. It had rained all afternoon, and even now the occasional drop pocked the wet stone of the promenade outside. The room Galing was waiting in was warm and dry and furnished with a set of books on natural history. Still, he had been waiting there for three hours.

He turned from the window and examined the tray his absent host had sent in some minutes earlier. Old cheese, new bread, a decanter of deep red wine, a silver pitcher of water. An apple and autumn pears, along with a pearl-handled knife to peel them with: enough food to acknowledge that he’d been kept waiting longer than expected; not enough to indicate that he would be kept waiting all the afternoon.

He took the knife and an apple and peeled it in a thin, continuous spiral, which he arranged jauntily on the edge of the tray. Then he sat down with the cheese and the decanter by the excellent fire to refresh himself. When the summons came, it wouldn’t do to appear before Arlen hungry or—he replaced the decanter on the tray and filled his glass with water—inattentive in any way. This meeting could make or break him with the enigmatic Serpent Chancellor. Nicholas had spent the past year maneuvering his way into Lord Arlen’s sphere, and had obliged his mysterious lordship in one or two small matters of interest to the Council, matters in which discretion and the ability to ask innocent-sounding questions had proved useful.

Nicholas smiled into the fire. He’d had no idea, going in, how exciting it was simply to have a secret. His new profession transmuted balls, picnics, card parties, even morning calls on ladies whose lowered lids and low-cut gowns held no allure for him into backdrops for a drama understood by only a select few. Everyone knew that Lady Talbot was enjoying a liaison with the Montrose heir, but only Nicholas—and Emil Montrose, and now the Council—knew that Emil was also enjoying the revenues of Lady Talbot’s farm in Stover, which he was plowing into his own exhausted estates. What Arlen and the Council would do with this information, Nicholas neither knew nor cared. The thing at the moment was to know it.

The door opened, and the soft-footed servant who had brought the tray slipped inside and cleared his throat.

“Lord Nicholas. Lord Arlen will see you now, if you would be so good as to follow me.”

The servant showed Nicholas into a largish room lined with old books and panels of painted wood—portraits, Nicholas supposed, of Arlens dead and gone. He was about to take a closer look at one when a small noise froze him where he stood, breathing slowly to still the sudden pelting of his heart. When he was sure he had himself under control, he turned to face the shadowy corner of the room and bowed deeply.

“Lord Arlen,” he said. “How delightful.”

A deep chuckle came from the shadows, followed by the scrape and flare of a lucifer, which revealed a tall, white-haired man sitting behind a great carved desk. He put the flame to the wick of an ornate brass lamp and replaced the glass.

“Do you mean my making you kick your heels for hours, or do you mean my trying to startle you out of your skin?”

Nicholas reflected that it was more pleasant to play with tigers when you weren’t in the cage with them and said, “I mean, delightful to see you, sir, and your beautiful house.”

“I already know you are a plausible rogue, Galing,” said Lord Arlen. “You needn’t keep trying to impress me. Sit down, do. And take a glass of wine. I’m going to ask you a favor.”

Nicholas carefully poured himself two fingers of crimson liquid from a gold-chased decanter.

“Very good,” said Arlen when Nicholas was settled. “Your hand didn’t shake and your face showed no more than polite interest. You handled the Montrose affair very well, did I tell you?”

Nicholas made a gesture expressive of modesty and pleasure. “I am your lordship’s to command,” he said.

“Yes,” Lord Arlen said. “I believe you are just the kind of man who will betray any confidence as long as he’s sure that it’s in the service of some greater good, preferably his own.”