The Heretic Kings (3 page)

“You wax philosophical this morning, Briscus. That is unlike you.”

“You must forgive me. It is a hazard of advancing years.”

From the formations below, lines of smoke puffed out and seconds later the clattering rumble of arquebus fire reached them on the hill. Regiments of arquebusiers were competing against each other to see who could reload the fastest, shooting down lines of straw figures that had been set up on the plain. Volley followed volley, until it seemed that a high-pitched thunder was being generated by the very earth and was clawing up to heaven. The plain below became obscured by toiling clouds of powder-smoke, the fog of war in its most literal sense. The heady smell of it drifted up to the two Electors on the hillside and they snuffed it in like hounds scenting a hare on a winter’s morning.

A third figure left the gaggle of officers around the stone table and stood to attention behind the Electors until the pair had noticed him. He was a square man; what he lacked in height he made up for in width. Even his chin was as regular as the blade of a shovel, his mouth a lipless gash above it partially obscured by a thick red moustache. His hair was cut so short as to stand up like the cropped mane of a horse; the mark of a man who often wore a helm.

“Well, Barbius?” Briscus asked the man. “How do they fare?”

Barbius stared straight ahead. “They’re about as handy as a bunch of seamstresses on a cold morning, sir.”

Briscus snorted with laughter. “But will they pass?”

“I’ll work them up a little more before we go, sir. Three rounds a minute, that’s our goal.”

“The Torunnans think themselves well-drilled if they can get off two in that time,” Kyriel said quietly.

“They’re not Torunnans, sir—with respect.”

“Damn right, by God!” Briscus said fervently. His one eye flashed. “I want your command to be as perfect as you can make it, Barbius. This will be the first Fimbrian army the rest of the kingdoms have seen in action for twenty-five years. We want to impress.”

“Yes, sir.” Barbius’ face had all the animation of a closed helm.

“Your baggage train?”

“Fifty carts, eight hundred mules. We travel light, sir.”

“And you’re happy with the route?”

Here Barbius allowed himself the merest sliver of a smile. “Through the Narian Hills by way of Tulm, and so to Charibon for the Pontifical blessing. Along the south-eastern shore of the Sea of Tor and down into Torunna by way of the Torrin Gap.”

“And another Pontifical blessing from the other Pontiff,” Kyriel added, his eyes dancing.

“You’ve been briefed on your behaviour and that of your men?” Briscus said, serious now.

“Yes, sir. We are to be as respectful as possible to the Pontiff and the Church authorities, but we are not to be deflected from our line of march.”

“There is nothing on that line which has the remotest chance of stopping a Fimbrian grand tercio,” Briscus said, his eye narrowing. “But you are to avoid the slightest friction with anyone, especially Almarkans. That is clear, Marshal? You are a nameless functionary; you are obeying orders. All complaints, protests and similar are to be directed to Fimbir, and you are not to delay your march for anything.”

“Of course, sir.”

“Let them think you are a mindless soldier whose job is to do as he is told. If you pause to argue with them just once, then they will wrap you up in coils of Inceptine law and hamstring you. This army must get through, Marshal.”

Barbius looked the Elector in the eye for the first time. “I know, sir.”

“Very well. Good luck. You are dismissed.”

Barbius slapped a forearm against his cuirass and left them. Kyriel watched him go, pulling at his lower lip with one restless hand.

“We are walking a rope here, Briscus.”

“Don’t I know it. Himerius must accept that we are going to help Torunna, heretic king or no; but we cannot afford to alienate him completely.”

“I see what you mean, about soldiers and politicians.”

“Yes. We live in a complicated world, Kyriel, but of late it’s become even more interesting than it was before.”

T WO

T HE King was gone, and there were those who said that he would never be coming back.

Abrusio.

Capital of the Kingdom of Hebrion, greatest port of the western world—indeed, some would say of the entire world. Only ancient Nalbeni might vie with Abrusio for the title.

For centuries the Royal House of the Hibrusids had ruled in Hebrion and their palace had frowned down over the raucous old port. There had of course been dynastic squabbles, internecine warfare, obscure marital entanglements; but in all that time the Royal house had never relaxed its grip on the throne.

Things had changed.

Winter had come to the west, propelled on the wings of war. The armies that battled on the eastern frontiers of the continent had withdrawn to their winter quarters and it seemed that the ships which plied the western seas had followed their example. The trade lanes of nations grew emptier as the waning year grew colder.

In Abrusio the Great Harbour, the Inner and Outer Roads as the other harbours were named, the sea itself, were whipped into a broken swell of tumultuous waves, white-tops gilding their tips. A steady roar of surf pounded the huge man-made moles that sheltered the harbours from the worst of the winter storms, and the beacon towers were lit along their length, gleaming flames battling the wind to warn approaching ships of the shallows and mark the harbour entrances.

The wind had backed as it freshened; the season for the Hebrian Trade had long ended, and now it howled in from the south-west, shoving Hebrion-bound vessels landwards and making the teeth of ship-masters grate as they fought to avoid that worst nightmare of any mariner, a lee shore.

Abrusio was not at its best at this time of year. It was not a city that relished winter. It housed too many pavement taverns, open-air markets and the like. It was a place which needed sunshine. In the summer its inhabitants might curse the unwavering heat that set the buildings shimmering and brought almost to an art form the stink of the sewers and tanneries, but the city was more alive, more crowded—like a termite-mound with a broken shell. In winter it closed in on itself; the harbours saw only a tithe of the trade they were accustomed to, and the waterside inns and brothels and ships suffered as a result. In winter the city tightened its belt, turned its face from the sea and grumbled to itself, awaiting spring.

A spring without a king, perhaps. For months King Abeleyn of Hebrion had been absent from his capital, away at the Conclave of Kings in Perigraine. In his absence the new High Pontiff of the west, Himerius—one-time Prelate of Hebrion—had ordered an army of the Church’s secular arm, the Knights Militant, into Abrusio to check the rising tide of sorcery and heresy in the old city. The King no longer ruled in Hebrion. Some said he would pick up the reins as soon as he returned from his travels. Others said that when the Church manages to worm its way into the chambers of government, it is not so easy to eject it.

S ASTRO di Carrera let the wind water his eyes and stood with his doublet billowing about him on the wide balcony. A tall man, his black beard oiled to a curling point and a ruby the size of a caper set in one ear, he had the hands of a lutist and the easy carriage of one accustomed to having his own way. And that was only natural, for he was the head of one of the great houses of Hebrion and, at present, one of the de facto rulers of the kingdom.

He stared out and down across the city. Below were the prosperous quarters of the merchants and the lesser nobility, the halls of some of the more prestigious guilds, the gardens of the rich denizens of the Upper City. Farther down the hills, the teeming slums and tenements of the poorer, low-born people; thousands of ochre-tiled roofs with hardly a gap between them. A sea of humble dwellings that bloomed out in the drizzle and wind of the day down to the harbours and the waterfronts, what some called the bowels of Hebrion. He could pick out the looming, stone-built massiveness of the arsenals and barracks in the western arm of the Lower City. Down there were the sinews of war, the culverins and powder and laid-up arquebuses and swords of the Crown. And the men: the soldiers who comprised the Hebrian tercios, some eight thousand of them. The mailed fist of Abrusio.

Looking farther out still, he fixed his gaze where the city ended in a maze of quays and jetties and warehouses, and a huge tangled forest of masts. Three enormous harbours crammed with miles of ship berths, an uncountable myriad of vessels from every port and kingdom in the known world. The bloodstream of trade, which kept Abrusio’s leathery old heart beating.

And there, over half a league away, Admiral’s Tower with its scarlet pennant snaking and snapping in the wind, hardly to be seen but for the glint of gold upon it. In the state shipyards rested galleys, galleasses, caravels and war-carracks by the hundred. The fleet of the most powerful seafaring nation west of the Cimbric Mountains. There, that was what power looked like. It was a gleam of iron on the barrel of a cannon; the glitter of steel at the head of a lance. It was the oak of a warship’s hull. These things were not the trappings, but the essence of power, and those who thought themselves in positions of authority often forgot that, to their lasting regret. Power in this day and age was in the muzzle of a gun.

“Sastro, for the Saint’s sake close the screen, will you? We’ll perish in here of the cold before we’re done.”

The tall nobleman smiled out at the wintry metropolis, cast his glance left, to the east, and he saw there something to brighten the dullness of the day. On a cleared patch of ground near the summit of the city, perhaps some four acres in extent, was what appeared to be a conflagration, a carpet of fire which lit up the afternoon. On closer inspection it might be seen that the inferno was not one single blaze, but a huge number of lesser bonfires grouped closely together. They were silent; the wind carried the hungry roar of the flames away from him. But he could just make out the dark stick-figure at the heart of every tiny, discrete fire. Every one a heretic, yielding up his spirit in a saffron halo of unimaginable agony. Over six hundred of them.

That, Sastro thought, is power also. The ability to withhold life.

He stepped in off the balcony and shut the intricately carved screen behind him. He found himself in a tall stone room, the walls hung with tapestries depicting scenes from the lives of various saints. Braziers burned everywhere, generating a warm fug, a charcoal smell. Only above the long table where the others sat did oil lamps burn, hanging from the ceiling on silver chains. The day outside, with the screen closed, was dark enough to make it seem nocturnal in here. The three men seated around the table, elbow-deep in papers and decanters, did not seem to notice, however. Sastro took his seat among them again. The headache which had occasioned his stepping out on to the balcony was still with him and he rubbed his throbbing temples as he regarded the others in silence.

The rulers of the kingdom, no less. The dispatch-runner had put in only that afternoon, a sleek galleass which had almost foundered in its haste to reach Abrusio. It had set out from Touron a scant nineteen days ago, spent a fortnight pulling against the wind to get clear of the Tulmian Gulf, and then had spread its wings before the wind all the way south along the Hebrian coast, running off eighty leagues a day at times. It bore a messenger from Vol Ephrir who was now a month on the road, who had hurtled north through Perigraine killing a dozen horses on the way, who had stopped at Charibon a night and then had hurtled on again until he had taken ship with the galleass in Touron. The messenger bore news of the excommunication of the Hebrian monarch.

Quirion of Fulk, Presbyter of the Knights Militant, an Inceptine cleric who bore a sword, leaned back from the table with a sigh. The chair cracked under his weight. He was a corpulent man, the muscle of youth melting into fat, but still formidable. His head was shaved in the fashion of the Knights, and his fingernails were broken by years of donning mail gauntlets. His eyes were like two gimlets set deep within a furrowed pink crag, and his cheekbones thrust out farther than his oft-broken nose. Sastro had seen prize-fighters with less brutal countenances.

The Presbyter gestured with one large hand towards the document they had been perusing.

“There you have it. Abeleyn is finished. The letter is signed by the High Pontiff himself.”

“It is hastily written, and the seal is blurred,” one of the other men said, the same one who had complained of the cold. Astolvo di Sequero was perhaps the most nobly born man in the kingdom after King Abeleyn himself. The Sequeros had once been candidates for the throne, way back in the murky past which followed the fall of the Fimbrian Hegemony some four centuries ago, but the Hibrusids had won that particular battle. Astolvo was an old man with lungs that wheezed like a punctured wineskin. His ambitions had been extinguished by age and infirmity. He did not want to be a player in the game, not at this stage of his life; all he wanted of the world now were a few tranquil years and a good death.

Which suited Sastro perfectly.

The third man at the table was hewn out of the same rock as Presbyter Quirion, though younger and with violence written less obviously across his face. Colonel Jochen Freiss was adjutant of the City Tercios of Abrusio. He was a Finnmarkan, a native of that far northern country whose ruler, Skarpathin, called himself a king though he was not counted among the Five Monarchs of the West. Freiss had lived thirty years in Hebrion and his accent was no different from Sastro’s own, but the shock of straw-coloured hair which topped his burly frame would always mark him out as a foreigner.

“His Holiness the High Pontiff was obviously pressed for time,” Presbyter Quirion said. He had a voice like a saw. “What is important is that the seal and signature are genuine. What say you, Sastro?”

“Undoubtedly,” Sastro agreed, playing with the hooked end of his beard. His temples throbbed damnably, but his face was impassive. “Abeleyn is king no more; every law of Church and State militates against him. Gentlemen, we have just been recognized by the holy Church as the legitimate rulers of Hebrion, and a heavy burden it is—but we must endeavour to bear it as best we may.”