Assassin's Reign: Book 4 of The Civil War Chronicles (10 page)

‘They were indeed,’ Slager said. ‘They cannot have England sit any longer on the sidelines. Things are desperate.’ He set his meaty jaw determinedly. ‘This will change everything, so they say.’

Robbens dipped his head piously. ‘I pray they are right.’

‘Unless he misses,’ Nobbs added nastily.

Robbens cast him a withering gaze. ‘I never miss.’

‘In your hands, or mine,’ Slager said to Nobbs, ‘the bow is dangerous enough. It is spanned using a screw built into the rear of the stock, so that a killing draw-weight can be achieved.’

‘Small, though,’ Nobbs said, his eye quivering again as he studied the steel weapon suspiciously. ‘The bolts must be like needles. One o’ those couldn’t knock m’ granny off a piss pot.’

Slager nodded. ‘It would not penetrate armour, you’re right, which is why it needs to be aimed by an expert if the throat or eyes are to be picked out. Fortunately, held by our Dutch friend here, it is unerringly deadly. It is the best balestrino bow money can buy. Robbens is the best shot money can buy.’

Nobbs sneered. ‘He looks half starved. You sure about that?’

Robbens’ eyes seemed to gleam, but he chose not to take the bait. ‘I can wield the piece well enough, friend.’

Nobbs dropped the crossbow back into the barrel. ‘Still need to get bloody close, though,’ he replied belligerently. ‘Don’t care how much you tighten the screw, it can’t fling anything too far. It just ain’t big enough.’

‘I will get close,’ Robbens said. ‘If Mister Slager can arrange the opportunity, I will take it.’

‘It will be arranged,’ Slager said. ‘Have no fear over that.’

‘And they’ll kill you,’ Nobbs added, a little too happily. ‘Soon as you loose the bolt, they’ll cut you to scraps.’

Robbens closed his eyes. ‘I have made my peace with God.’

Nobbs shook his head, nonplussed. ‘Bloody antick.’

Robbens’ eyelids snapped open, his thin face creasing in a smile devoid of warmth. ‘With two bolts, Mister Nobbs, I wager I could pierce each of your stones. Would you like to take the bet?’

Slager leant forward for the first time. ‘Enough, sir.’ He looked at Nobbs. ‘I hope you are not losing faith.’

‘No, sir, ’course not,’ Nobbs said quickly. ‘Just that m’ mammy always told of the old longbows.’

‘That they had the greatest range, were the most accurate?’ Slager asked. ‘And where would we find a bowman of the calibre to shoot it? The draw-weight on a longbow is more than a normal man can bear. It takes a lifetime to wield one properly. But this,’ he glanced at the cask. ‘This can be brought to bear by any man. The only question is the man’s aim. And I have brought Robbens all the way from the Continent because he never misses.’

Nobbs nodded reluctantly. ‘What now, sir?’

Slager sat back. ‘We wait for the Cavaliers to make their move, and follow them to whichever poor town is next to face their wickedness. We take Master Robbens with us, and he takes the new bow. Sooner or later the malignants will make a mistake, and he will be allowed close enough to the mark.’

‘And then,’ Robbens added quietly, ‘I will put a bolt in the mark’s Romish throat, and the war will be over.’

Slager threaded his hands behind his head, easing back into the chair, a smile of contentment spreading across his fleshy face. ‘And another war can begin.’

Ashton Vale, near Bristol, 4 August 1643

Colonel Artemas Crow’s throat itched. He imagined a doctor might tell him the humours of the inn, so pungent with sotweed and filthy bodies the previous night, had irritated his lungs, and that fresh air was the only remedy. But he knew better. His throat always itched, and his heart always pounded and his jaw and gums always ached from the grinding of rotten teeth. All because his mind had turned, as it so often did, to an infantryman with long, rook-dark hair and one grey eye.

‘Stryker,’ he said aloud. He lifted the wooden cup, rim worn pale by a generation of use, and took a long drag of the small beer, hoping it would jolt him awake. He was seated at a table that had been pushed hard against one of the White Hart Inn’s grimy walls. From there, he gazed over the vessel at his men, good troopers all, as they began to stir, groaning and yawning and stretching as sleep began to give ground to the new day. He did not approve of this kind of place. He despised the strong drink his men imbibed, detested the dice that had been thrown and the bawdy songs the merry dragoons had bellowed to the rafters. His small, battered Bible had felt suddenly heavy in one of his coat’s breast pockets, as he had watched the serving-girls throw themselves at his lads, and he had prayed aloud as he had swived one of the fairer little punks himself. But what could he do? He had been billeted here, his men thrust into Satan’s jaws, and there was little to be done but suffer it with humility.

Now, though, as the morning sun climbed up from the eastern hills, his cloudy mind was once again captive to that man who made the night’s sufferings seem tawdry. ‘Captain Stryker,’ Crow said again, turning the words on his tongue as though they formed some wicked incantation. It disgusted him that such a man might hold a blade in the king’s grand army. ‘Let alone a fucking commission!’

‘Colonel, sir?’

Crow glanced to his left. There, sat at the adjacent table, rubbing the dregs of sleep from his eyes with broad, calloused palms, was a black-haired man of muscular physique and square, heavily bearded face.

‘My nemesis, Major Triggs.’

Triggs thought for a moment, rubbing the pale gully of a deep scar that bisected his right cheek from earlobe to nostril. ‘The plodder we ran into yesterday, sir?’

‘The very same. Captain Stryker is his name. A more wicked cur you will not encounter.’

It surprised Crow, this hatred. Sometimes he would catch himself brooding on the one-eyed infantryman, noticing the familiar itching in his windpipe, the whitened knuckles or grinding teeth, and he would have to physically shake his head to rid his mind of the demon. It was a burning resentment, a never-dying ember that would flare unexpectedly to scorch his mind and mood. Christ, but he hated Stryker.

Crow considered himself to be a reasonable fellow in the main. Quick-tempered, admittedly, and his late wife would often accuse him of ill-humoured irascibility, but times were difficult, and war had the power to bring tension to the most sanguine of bodies. He was a hard man, but a fair one, and that, Crow felt, was all that could be asked of him. But Stryker had come along, had strutted into his life in the smouldering ruin that was Cirencester, and murdered his two beloved illegitimate sons. His wife might have been pleased at the thought of Saul and Caleb finally being cut from their lives – and any pretension to inheritance – but Artemas Crow had loved them as his own. Separated from him by society, he had used war to bring them closer, providing them with posts within his new regiment of dragoons. He had always enjoyed the fact that he had used conflict to unite his family, even as it tore so many others apart. Yet all that joy, all that possibility, had been stolen from him on a single night.

‘The 2nd of February 1643,’ he muttered.

The major scratched a knot of dried pottage from his whiskers. ‘Sir?’

‘The night Stryker made my life crumble to ruin. I have never forgotten that damnable warlock’s face, or the wrongs he has done me. But then it was there, wasn’t it?’ He remembered the moment he had looked upon Stryker on the road outside Bristol. He had feared his heart might stop in that very instant. ‘The 2nd of February 1643. That date will remain with me,’ he tapped a finger against his temple, ‘
branded
up here, until the day I’m put in the ground. It is the day I will avenge.’ A thought bloomed in his mind’s eye, glittering and radiant, as the sun bloomed beyond the White Hart’s dank walls. ‘No, Samuel. It is the day
you
will avenge for me.’

Triggs nodded eagerly. ‘Gladly, Colonel. Tell me where he is and I’ll run the bastard clean through.’

Crow offered an appreciative smile, but shook his head all the same. ‘He is protected by men you would not wish to cross.’ The proud face of Prince Rupert replaced that of Stryker in his mind, and he shuddered. That Teutonic rake-hell was the murderer’s patron, and not even Crow would dare make an enemy of him. ‘Rupert and his brother, Prince Maurice, are two of the most dangerous men in the land. They would not be kind to a man who had hurt their little lap dog.’ The king’s strutting nephews were the worst kind of Cavaliers to Crow’s mind. Brash swaggerers both, darlings of court and army. Unbeatable fighting popinjays. Men clamoured to be in their regiments, men’s wives clamoured to be in their breeches. Artemas Crow was not about to move against their favourite soldier with such audacity.

‘Besides,’ he said, thinking back to the aftermath of Stryker’s original crimes, ‘I have followed that course already, and failed.’

‘Major Edberg,’ Triggs replied grimly.

Crow nodded. ‘Your predecessor underestimated Stryker’s lust for blood, and was himself murdered. Stryker is one of the Cavaliers who poison the King’s cause as sure as Pym and his dogs cock their legs against it. Not of the same lofty breeding as the princes, and certainly,’ he mused with a half-smile, ‘a damned sight uglier than the sons of the Winter Queen. But he is a man of action, I am forced to concede. Touched by luck and blessed with Rupert’s patronage, and that makes him extremely dangerous. The knife we wield must be subtle. Do you have a man, Triggs? A trusted fellow? One who might watch Stryker, get close to him, engaging only when the moment is right?’

Triggs breathed loudly through his nostrils and tilted his head back to look at the ceiling. Eventually he dropped his gaze again, meeting his commanding officer’s small blue eyes with the merest hint of satisfaction. ‘Aye, sir. I believe I do.’

Hartcliffe, near Bristol, 4 August 1643

Stryker did not much care for Ezra Killigrew. He thought the fellow a pompous, self-important prig who enjoyed wallowing in his master’s power as a dog might roll in fox shit. But he knew it was unwise to ignore the summons and now, just an hour after sunrise, he found himself following Killigrew along a narrow track through the fields to the south of the village.

‘How far?’ he growled in irritation.

Killigrew did not look back. ‘Not far, Captain, not far at all.’

‘Christ, man, do you ever grow weary of your games?’

Killigrew gave a nasal chuckle, flattening down the slick black hair that was glued firmly to his pate by pungent lavender oil. ‘Never, sir.’

‘I am in no mood for this.’

Killigrew stopped and turned. ‘When are you ever, Captain? His Highness says you have been tiresomely maudlin since Stratton.’

Stryker felt himself tense. ‘Mind your tongue, Killigrew, or I’ll—’

The pudgy shrew’s face creased in an unpleasant smile, revealing crooked teeth and gums that were red-raw. ‘You’ll what, sir?’

It was a good question. What Stryker would like to do to Ezra Killigrew and what he had the courage to do were worlds apart. He breathed deep, feeling his heart quieten, and forced his fists to uncurl. ‘How far?’

Killigrew winked a thick eyelid and pointed to a dense stand of trees at the far end of the field. ‘Just beyond that copse.’

The rendezvous point was a grassy glade, accessed by three or four small tracks but invisible from the main road. A clandestine spot if ever there was one, Stryker mused, as he skirted the last of the trees in Killigrew’s scuttling wake. Up ahead he could see a collection of horsemen milling at the glade’s centre, all facing inwards, collective attention taken by something – or some- one – within. There were a dozen of them, all dishevelled and mud-spattered from a hard ride, but, even at a distance, it was clear that these were no mere cavalrymen. The beasts they rode were well bred and heartily fed – big, sleek and muscular – while pommels gleamed like sceptres from ornate sword-hilts and cloaks flashed as gilded thread caught the light. Stryker felt his ruined eye socket tingle, the patchwork of mottled pits feeling constricted at the edges, contracting in time with his quickening pulse.

‘He has his entourage, I see,’ Stryker muttered.

‘Not your favourite fedaries, Captain?’ Killigrew answered dryly. ‘There, at least, we find common ground. Still, the Prince will ever draw a following, be it a troop of strutting toadies in the field or a gaggle of breathless young maidens at court.’

‘Damn the spavined villains!’ the voice exploded like an incendiary shell at the epicentre of the glade. Stryker glanced at Killigrew. The supercilious aide proffered that irritating wink once more, stooped in a low, mocking bow, and moved quietly aside.

Stryker stepped forward, swallowing hard. The horsemen parted like the Red Sea as they made way for one of their party. Even atop his mount it was clear the man was tall. He had a slim frame, though broad at the shoulder like an acrobat, and a long face made predatory by a sharp nose and dark, intelligent eyes. His buff-coat was well worn, weathered and crusty, but it could not hide the fashionably laced suit of blue and yellow beneath, or the ostentatious scarf of bright red that was tied in an enormous knot at the small of the man’s back. The upturned bucket-top boots were dirty but clearly of fine quality, and the red ribbon in his wide-brimmed hat was shot through with silver thread that seemed to shimmer against his long, tar-coloured hair.