Drakenfeld (2 page)

Maxid was the size of an ox and just as fragrant. His long hair was damp with sweat and every time he shaved, his beard seemed to be reborn within the hour. His brutish figure looked ill at ease
in the impressive doublet and cloak of a soldier of the Sun Chamber. Despite his appearance and occupation, he was actually a mellow man at heart and a softly spoken soul.

‘Well?’ I asked.

‘It’s done.’

‘You didn’t kill him then?’

‘Oh good heavens, no.’

‘There’s a first time for everything.’

‘Well, I’m a careful fellow,’ he said, with a level of refinement that didn’t suit the rest of his image. ‘You see, I only used minute amounts of silver to burn
away his eyeballs. Any more would have gone into his brain.’ Maxid gestured at his own head to illustrate his point. ‘It just isn’t any good. As I say so often, this is a job for
only the highly skilled.’

‘He’s free to go now,’ I said. ‘We can release him at the temple gates, but for Polla’s sake, at least give him a stick to help him, and see that he’s well
looked after. Cornellus was ultimately a respectable man with a powerful family, and we should treat him with all the dignity we can. We don’t want to get a reputation for tormenting people
needlessly.’

Maxid nodded glumly. ‘Ah. I don’t suppose you could do that instead? He might not wake for another hour or more, and I’d dearly like to ride back now while the sun’s
still high.’

‘All right, I’ll wait.’

‘You’re a good fellow.’

‘What job have you got lined up next?’

‘None at the moment,’ Maxid said, packing some vicious-looking tools into a leather bag. ‘I’ve a little free time. Our agents are doing good business and my skills are in
high demand these days. So for now I’m going back to Venyn City and I intend to purchase some lithe young studs to bed for the next day or two, before another request comes in.’

I smiled. ‘Buying love won’t make you happy.’

‘Who said anything about love?’ Maxid replied with a small smile.

‘Well, as long as it keeps you off the streets. Oh, that reminds me, this is for you.’ I reached into my pocket, pulled out a purse of money and threw it over to him. ‘Make
sure you don’t catch any diseases.’

Maxid caught the purse in one muscled hand and peered inside, scrutinizing the contents. ‘Well, farewell, Drakenfeld!’ He picked up his belongings from the corner of the room and
lumbered straight past me.

I glanced once again at the still form of Cornellus, feeling regret at what had transpired. The law could be brutal at times – but, as I told myself so often, Vispasia would be a far
darker place if there was no law.

Leana was sitting in the late afternoon sunlight, her dark brown skin glimmering in the heat. The stone seats were almost too hot to sit on, but I managed to perch alongside
her. Dressed in tight-fitting clothing the colour of the local stone, and with a sword sheathed at her waist, she was watching children from the local village as they ran around a fountain, each of
them waving a small wooden doll above their heads. She explained that the children were playing a game based on the birth of Procetes. Little plumes of dust rose up from the street as they dashed
about with abandon, while elderly beggars watched from afar and pulled themselves deeper into the sanctuary of the shade.

‘The heat, it never slows down children,’ Leana commented. ‘If the dolls were carved from bone, it would remind me of a game I played when I was as old as they are. Here . .
.’ Shading her eyes with one hand, she handed me a tube containing a rolled-up letter. ‘A messenger gave me this.’

I eyed the tube in my hands. Letters were always something to be cautious about: they were usually requests for me to travel somewhere else, demands for more paperwork, news of a trivial dealing
in a provincial town that needed addressing, or complaints from some nobody about the way they had been treated. But I noted the seal of the Sun Chamber in the wax, and opened the letter
immediately.

Reading it, I felt a numbness hammering me. Hands shaking – just for a moment – I absorbed the information, even though none of it seemed to register at first.

‘What is it?’ Leana asked.

Words felt trapped in my throat. ‘My father has died.’

Rarely did I see emotion in Leana’s face, let alone sympathy, but there it was – I hoped it wouldn’t last too long.

‘How did he pass?’ she asked.

‘Something to do with his heart, so it says.’ I held the letter in the air before returning my hands to my lap. ‘A natural death.’

‘Your loss is great, Lucan. I am . . . so sorry. I will make a sacrifice to Gudan tonight to see that the spirits comfort him.’

Not now
, I wanted to say,
please none of this spirit nonsense now
– but I didn’t. Instead I rested my head back against the stone wall and stared up into the
blinding sun.

Deep into the night, when Leana was asleep in her bed at the far end of our tavern room, after I had made my prayers to Polla and noted down the events of the day, I opened the
letter and read it again by candlelight, contemplating the words, hoping they would gain more clarity.

My father, one of the greatest Sun Chamber officials who had ever lived, was already a fading memory. Greatness can be a matter of perception, however. Though he paid for an excellent and
privileged life for myself and my brother, Marius, he never quite knew what to do with us after our mother died. Various people cared for us while he was busy with work. Names and faces came and
went with the seasons. When he spent time with us we were beaten no more than the average child of Tryum. My brother, who was a year younger than me, took things to heart. I could never identify
with his utter loathing of our father. Ultimately I felt I had more right to hate our father, after what he did to me at the time.

Despite any negative feelings, I always respected him. My only true treasured memory of him was when I was only seven or eight summers old, sitting in our garden while my father explained to me
the importance of his badge of office – the one I also wear. I asked him what the Sun Chamber was and I still remember, for the first time, a softening in his voice and posture, a quiet pride
that began to show. He became a different man.

The Vispasian Royal Union, he explained, was made up of the eight nations of this continent. Each royal head, with the help of elected representatives, enacted the principles of the founding
treaties of the continent, the most fundamental of which was that there would be no war between nations. We prospered. There was peace and security. He looked me in the eye and said that he helped
to enforce the essential laws that maintained a bond. ‘We are peacemakers,’ he said, ‘not warmongers. The world is better for it. There is no more important job.’

It was inevitable that I would follow that path, and his affection grew for me after I made that decision.

However, I spent my later life in his shadow. My conversations with older officials throughout the Vispasian Royal Union would often involve them referring to him and his famous cases with
affection. My world was often comprised of being the son of Calludian rather than a man in my own right, and perhaps that reputation would never fully go away. Death rarely seemed to end the
business of the living. But this man – who I had both feared and admired, who had given me life and then dictated its path without realizing – was no more.

I was no longer Son of Calludian. I was Lucan Jupus Drakenfeld, second generation officer of the Sun Chamber. A free man.

I watched the flame of the candle for some time, contemplating all these matters, trying to recover my memories of the buildings and people that defined my time in Tryum; moments of my childhood
returned to my mind, the walls that bore my graffiti, the games we played in the street.

Eventually, as it always does, the candle sparked out.

Preparing for my return home, the following morning I headed to the merchant house by the harbour in Venyn City, capital of the nation of Venyn, to exchange my money for a
receipt with the intention of exchanging it back for the local currency, pecullas, upon reaching Tryum in Detrata. I put the receipt in a small leather tube that I hung around my neck, and walked
along the seafront, enjoying the pleasant morning sunshine and the salt tang on the breeze for perhaps the last time. For who knew where I would be sent next after dealing with my father’s
affairs – Sun Chamber officers tended to be dispatched wherever we were most needed, though often it seemed that Leana and I had been forgotten in this city. I wrote confirmation of my
travels and posted them to the sheriff, who all officers reported to, and took the long walk home one final time.

From a steep hillside, Venyn City plunged down to an estuary, which was currently cluttered with large shipping vessels. The water was murky at best, containing the scrubbed-off dirt from a
thousand dubious souls. It was only further out to sea that the water became a true and brilliant blue.

Thanks to the wind, the hills facing the sea were relieved of the stifling, oppressive heat, which caused such discomfort to the city dwellers. Conspiring winds and the searing sun made the
streets full of hot, damp dust that accumulated on the cracked lips of the beggars taking refuge in the shadows of decrepit buildings. Hundreds of starving dogs slunk in the alleyways or lay like
the dead in whatever small shade they could find. Even the fat palm trees growing in the tropical gardens seemed to wilt in the humidity.

Over the centuries, Venyn had seemed to suffer the indifference of its gods, with invading nations plundering its spoils then abandoning its people. It had once been the centre of the grain
route, but when cheaper prospects were found elsewhere the money dried up and Venyn then found itself as far from prosperity as was possible for a city. The refuge of the desperate, the debauched
and the degraded, it was not a pleasant place to live any more, but somehow people scraped an existence. Legal or otherwise. It was no surprise the Sun Chamber had sent me here, a criminal base, a
country of unrest. Agents and officers only tended to come together in larger numbers when a major crisis presented itself.

Crime on this scale wasn’t considered a crisis when it was part of everyday life.

Despite the heat, the dirt and the stench of rotting refuse – I couldn’t hate the place. I had been working here for six years. How many times had I narrowly avoided being killed on
the streets in this city: escaping a mugging, loosening the grip of a desperate homeless person, or politely, then more firmly, resisting the calls of the men and women leaning out of the windows
of a dockyard bordello?

The Sun Chamber had spies, but they were always on the move, always walking in circles higher than my own; and they tended to contact us only when they needed to. I could rely only upon my own
skills – and later, Leana’s – and that was the point. After all, it was the reason I came here in the first place, to build something of a reputation for myself.

While I wouldn’t miss trying to bring order to one of the most corrupt cities of the Vispasian Royal Union, I appreciated that this often forgotten corner of Vispasia had, at least,
sharpened my senses and honed my skills as an officer of the Sun Chamber. Though we had not exactly cleansed the streets of all nefarious activities, I liked to think, looking back, that where
there had been disorder there was now some structure.

These dirty, ancient streets were now a more civilized place. While not being one to dwell on my successes too much, modesty being one of the precepts of Polla, having weighed up my performances
I felt I could at least leave proud.

There was almost always a Sun Chamber officer stationed in every large town and city throughout the Vispasian Royal Union. Presumably my replacement would find the city still a
challenge. He or she would have to build up their own local network of confidants and learn the hard way that Venyn City was tough work.

The Sun Chamber, a vast and bureaucratic organization, enforces the Treaty of Royal Blood, a two-centuries-old law that bound together the eight nations of Vispasia in union. The treaty came off
the back of the bloody wars that resulted from the collapse of the old Detratan Empire, in which the continent sustained huge losses of life. One by one the nations decided it would be best for all
if they maintained peace. Even to this day, royals head twice a year to the Council of Kings in Free State, central Vispasia, in order to debate matters of continental trade and politics. The
alliance is not an easy one, and now and then a king may threaten to withdraw his nation from the union, but peace has been maintained. In that time, the Sun Chamber had acquired land of its own,
developed a vast network of agents and officers, so much so that more senior figures, far above the rank of officer, were often depended upon to give advice on trade and commerce.