Fugitive Prince (41 page)

T
he morning began innocuously enough. The Mad Prophet set out to get drunk and the written verses, commissioned by a merchant for his love-struck young bride, lent the first opportunity to absent himself. Arithon asked for a servant to complete the delivery. Flushed since their horrendous argument at dawn, still unnerved from the sting of the Masterbard’s refusal to abandon his wiles at Riverton, Dakar volunteered for the errand.

“I need the excuse to get out,” he snapped in bruised candor as he snatched up the ribboned parchment. Only the anonymity of another tavern would let him drown his sorrows in peace. Stay, and he risked the inebriated folly of marching upstairs to battle the same cause all over again.

On the subject of increased risks at the shipyard, Arithon stayed deaf to reason. To break off as resident bard at the Laughing Captain within days of another launching would risk his connection with the men now set in precarious position to spirit the new ships from the harbor.

In due course, the infatuated merchant received the promised scroll, his jewels subdued like sunken treasure in the depths of his pillared foyer. His expansive contentment left three Shandian sovereigns in the hands of the bard’s scowling courier.

The Mad Prophet blinked. Dimpled into a smile of moist-eyed
gratitude, he asked leave to depart through the merchant’s back courtyard. He plowed through the daily mayhem of commerce: baled goods and sweating men loading wains, and made for the seaside quarter.

Dakar wasted no time. Racked by distress as devouring as guilt, set after by worry throughout the Shadow Master’s string of reckless successes, he reeled from the taproom of the Oyster ten minutes after it opened. He knew better than to stay. The proprietor’s two heavies took a dim view of patrons who lolled in seamy stupor on the floor. Cheerful from the foresight which spared him their attentions, Dakar clutched a crock of Orvandir’s best red in each fist. The contents of a third one sloshed in his belly, and the day seemed suddenly very fine.

Languorous, honey sunlight poured over the checked boards of the quay. A man in search of quiet could find a sheltered niche if he poked between the hogsheads of salt pork stacked for bulk sale to the pursers. The spring season also offered up rotting heaps of fishnets, discarded as salvage for ragmen.

Dakar felt no shame for his lapse into debauchery. If Arithon s’Ffalenn could ignore every sensible warning, then the fool who elected to stay at his shoulder must squelch a sane conscience by whatever means lay at hand.

Yet in the cramped alley between the quayside brothels, the best of laid plans went astray.

A chubby, tousled potter linked Dakar’s arm, soon joined by a journeyman cobbler who was lanky as a pole, and snared in the teeth of misfortune.

“Man, it’s my temper gets my fat in the fire, every time,” he lamented, while the potter peered up, arms folded like a judge, and Dakar marked time, scuffing a stripped bone in the gutter. The tale unfolded, a swan song of dismissal from a master’s craftshop for pinking a fussy customer with an awl. “What a piss-mongering shrew, never pleased with anything. I went to chalk her size, and let me tell you! The bitch threatened not to pay if the outline looked undainty. Kicked like a mule each time your finger grazed her ankle.”

The cobbler rolled his eyes. “As if any man with the itch would tup a cow like
her
for relief. Likely that’s what keeps her broody. I shouldn’t’ve jabbed her. But a patten in the groin’s a fighting provocation. Damn me! For such a piddling wee trickle o’ blood, she scarcely had to squeal like a hog dragged by the haunches to slaughter.”

“Never mind,” the potter soothed. “Women get themselves born to
cause trouble.” He added a suggestive nudge to Dakar, who obliged and surrendered the crock.

Two shopgirls and a passing sailor’s bawd fell in with the consolation party under the plank walks of a tenement. Pinches were exchanged amid trilling giggles. The cobbler shrugged off his disaffection. Enlivened by the surge of merry spirits, the bawd drew the cork on the last crock of wine, the name of her jack-tar forgotten.

By then, Dakar had insinuated a hand under one doxie’s blouse. The other, who was blond, kissed him silly until his means to escape into a numb stupor had been squandered. He tried to take his leave, but his chance-met acquaintances towed him along, disregarding every protest as they rollicked their way past the shops on Weaver’s Alley.

Nobody was either upright or sober. To missteps and shrieks of uproarious glee, they ricocheted off signposts and buildings. The doxie donned a wig of yarns cut from the warp ends of a loom, then embarked on a simpering impersonation of the crown exciseman’s second wife. Hurting with laughter and winded as well, after dodging some spiteful matron’s barrage of flowerpots, Dakar folded in half to catch his wind. When the placement of a lamppost stopped his list toward the pavement, he seized the moment to take stock.

A hooked sprig of gentian trailed from his ear. Crumbled earth and shards of terracotta sifted down his collar from his hair. He suffered the twinges of a bounding headache, and wine fumes made it difficult to think. Instead of drinking himself painlessly senseless, he found himself perspiring and itchy as a dog in the untidy wool of his jerkin.

His uncoordinated squirms to shed the hot garment dislodged his last sovereigns. The pair rolled in chiming duet down the gutter.

Shopgirls and whore butted heads as they pounced. Since the cobbler waxed morose, they rescued Dakar from the jammed wads of his clothing and chivvied him down a back alley to purchase more spirits.

“We need a rum seller,” slurred the potter. “Since the day those blighted ships sailed and vanished from the harbor, every dive in the quarter’s turned lousy with off-duty guardsmen.”

Dakar agreed. As principal henchman to the pirate responsible, he held no enthusiasm for hobnobbing next to crown soldiers. Distressed by untimely reminder of his angst, he latched onto the first available crock and sucked rotgut spirits until his middle felt tight as a blowfish.

Afternoon passed in a dizzy whirl of noise, the indistinct moments overlapped on themselves like a salvager’s haul of glass and flotsam. Dakar stayed transfixed while the cobbler fell prostrate. Cart traffic
jammed. Burly teamsters shook their fists in an argument over which should step down and drag the lout clear of the thoroughfare. The Mad Prophet bet a penny on the outcome, then wandered in circles, confused. A swarthy cooper insisted the combatants were knocked senseless, while the potter swore by the toes on his feet that the town guard had dragged off both parties. Dakar blinked like a turtle. Sunk in cogitation to recall which cheating craftsman still owed him a winning portion, he tired of walking, and wound up parked on his hams in a bakery.

The potter seemed content, crunching down the stale shortbread stars left over after the solstice. When his gestures grew vehement, he fell off his stool. The baker tried to right him and got his eye blacked. Tossed back on the street, Dakar had to stop and grope for the coins to buy another jack of whiskey. His doxie had vanished. He refused to go farther without a replacement, and there she stood, scaling cod over a bucket by a cookstall. The potter settled down, obliging, while Dakar kissed his newest find, his gaze gone dewy from her overwhelming perfume of fish oil.

The shops closed. Dusk loomed like smoky pearl through the drifting snags of river mist, while Dakar swore and wept, half-prostrate across the butt of an unopened keg. Four apprentices from the blacksmith’s helped him free the jammed bung. The singing after that became damaging, with Dakar by then doubled over in the gutter, caught in between a whistling bout of hiccups and the necessity of rendering his gorge.

Night fell, and the crabbed old torchman lit the lamps. Stumbling past the flare of his wind-jerked brand, Dakar reeled and collided through streets grown inexplicably crowded. He felt no premonition, no compelling sense of urgency. His tipsy curiosity led him to surmise that some disturbance had arisen in the market square. Rather than fight the press, he tacked that direction. The throng soon jostled him away from his companions. If they had gone because his wallet was empty, the fine point scarcely mattered. Mazed by the muddle which foreran a damning hangover, Dakar pawed the sleeve of a maidservant to ask why the festival should happen five days late. “Can’t anybody see? The moon nearest to spring equinox passed her full phase last week.”

Her words about captives and barbarians at the gates seemed a ridiculous fiction.

Dakar called her a liar, swore back as he was sworn at, then reverted to unctuous, smiling beneficence as her burly pack of brothers grasped his collar. Their fists shot him reeling through a mailed cordon of armed men, and he escaped getting skewered because he fell.

He flung out his arms to break his headlong sprawl and plunged to the wrists in a warm, clotted mass of bloodied straw. The spill was fresh. Dakar recoiled, slammed witless with revulsion. He yelled and scrambled upright to denounce the royal guardsmen for staging their unruly public spectacle in a slaughter yard.

Yet words never came. Speech foundered, as if nervous reflex reacted a heartbeat ahead of trained mage-sight. Jarred from his drunken stupor as water might slam into rock, Dakar pulled up short, crumpled over by mangling nausea. The pale, phosphor haze twined through the night air was not steam winnowed up by the chill, but the imprint of spirit light shocked free of live flesh at the moment of violent death.

The aura dispersed by this recent act of bloodshed resolved no animal’s dumb agony. Dakar retched with horror, caught in reverberated pain pitched too fine to be other than human.

The spasm sapped all his volition to move. Dakar hugged his griped middle and wished the rest of his awareness would stop functioning. Then perhaps he could deny that what arose above his head was a scaffold for a public execution. He dared not look up lest he find himself damned.
Ath preserve, while he drank, Arithon had been left undefended.
Lord Jieret had delivered them a warning and a prophecy. Regret came, too late, and the sorry, wretched fear:
that the blood on his wrists could be royal.

“Come on, you! Move along! You’re in the way.” The guardsmen had outworn their patience.

When they prodded with pike poles and gained no response, they hauled the barging miscreant to his feet without care for his mewling denial. Garbage thrown by the screaming mob splattered against the boards and someone’s poor aim raised a bold round of raillery from a prisoner. The accent sounded too clipped to be townborn. Since no city officer or tribunal seemed in evidence to restore the crowd to civil order, logic at last wakened reason. The condemned men had to be clanborn. Dakar’s chastened glance showed one already dead, with two more bound up for disembowelment.

He lurched against restraint and rounded on the guardsmen. “Ath, you can’t do this!” He shot a drunken kick at the nearest man-at-arms, impelled by white rage and urgency. The law’s murdering, thirsty sword must not reap another irreplaceable bloodline. “Your prince has commandeered these captives as galley slaves!”

A mailed fist smashed back and silenced him. “Not this lot. Now be off.”

Dakar was ejected by two brutes with maces, who rammed him into the surging onlookers, then closed ranks to reform their cordon.

“Gutless sheep!” Dakar yelled through a stinging, split lip. “Whose order commands this?”

“Be still, you fool!” A woman snatched his elbow to restore his good sense. “These skulking clan curs tried to slip through our gates. For that, their lives were called forfeit.”

But Dakar shook off her well-meant restraint. “Do I look like an idiot? No clansman would visit a walled city unless he was crazed with a death wish!” Yet even as he spoke, he discerned the contradiction: messengers from Lord Maenol might attempt such a course if they carried a warning for Arithon.

Belligerent with rum, Dakar rammed the soldiers, screaming to demand a stay of mercy.

Too late; across the pale span of boards overhead, amid the streamed sparks from crude torches, the sword fell and rammed home. Blood sprayed from a man’s opened chest. Painted in gory, flittering light, his death spasms splashed Dakar in a hot, obscene rain. “No! Save us all! Stop lest you call down disaster!”

The executioner heeded no outcry amid that raucous sea of noise. Raised above a crowd that howled for a spectacle, he angled his stroke to claim his last victim.

“Let the man live!” Dakar ducked a pike staff. Citizens hemmed him in too closely on all sides. No spell of illusion his power might fashion could sway them in time to matter. Left no better course, he jammed his shoulder in someone’s ribs and tried a fumbling charge to fling himself onto the scaffold.

The bite of armored hands ripped him back. He fought and clawed, flayed the skin off his knuckles in attempt to land punches on chain mail. The one soldier he felled clamped a hold on his ankle. Another’s blunt weapon clouted the back of his neck.

Vision imploded to a blast of white sparks. Dakar swayed as his knees gave. The torches upended. The studs of a guard’s armored bracer rasped his cheek. Then howling darkness arose and engulfed him; not from the blow. Nor yet from the hammering kicks which tumbled his body on the paving.

“Spare me, no,” Dakar gasped. But no round of pummeling could avert his cascading slide into precognizant trance. The noise of the crowd dimmed inexorably into distance as consciousness frayed into the welling, black tide of his spurious talent for prophecy.

He beheld the low, serried flats near the marshland of Mogg’s Fen. Bare tufts of brush snagged through a floss of pale mist and moonlight. Amid mounded hummocks and the quartz sheen of streamlets, men skirmished.

The light-footed, furtive ones wore the undyed leathers of clansmen. Their opponents sloshed ahead in a body, encumbered by shields and byrnies. The glint of their helms bobbed like bubbles in lead as they hacked at cattails and sunken logs in attempt to rout out lurking foes. Southward, they pressed, to the beat and clang of metal. Harried officers kept them moving, while arrows hissed in, and ambushes and traps minced at their flanks and impeded their forward progress…