Not Really the Prisoner of Zenda
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Authors: Joel Rosenberg
Not Really the Prisoner of Zenda
Book Ten of the Guardians of the Flame
Joel Rosenberg
Kethol is an adventurer with an easy smile, a man who is quick with a quip and quicker with a sword.
His partner, Pirojil, the ugly one, looks impressive and deceives people into thinking he's stupid to their sorrow-for his might and loyalty are worth a kingdom.
And the fledgling wizard Erenor, a man who tries to stay two steps ahead of his enemies, as well as one step ahead of his friends.
Loyal retainers they are, sworn to Jason Cullianane, a man who walked away from a crown, and who has been trying to convince all the almost-warring factions that he doesn't want the job back. Their lives aren't very easy, what with keeping Jason from getting killed by yet another conspiracy, rescuing some damsel or whatnot in distress, and squirreling away something for the ever-diminishing prospect of retirement.
And now it looks like our heroes might wind up succeeding in none of their schemes, for there are plots within plots, and Kethol has been forced into a disguise not of his own making. There is magic aplenty in the air (and on the ground), and in order to save a kingdom, they may have to pull off a complicated scheme that could kill them all--or land them in positions of supreme power.
But, hey, whoever said that a soldier's life was a cakewalk?
Books by Joel Rosenberg from Tom Doherty Associates
Home Front
Foreign Land
Not Exactly the Three Musketeers*
Not Quite Scaramouche*
Not Really the Prisoner of Zenda*
*Fantasy
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this novel are either fictitious or used fictitiously.
NOT REALLY THE PRISONER OF ZENDA: A GUARDIANS OF THE FLAME NOVEL
Copyright © 2003 by Joel Rosenberg
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof, in any form.
Edited by Claire Eddy
This 
ePub edition v1.0 by Dead^Man April, 2011
A Tor Book 
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
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New York, NY 10010
Tor
®
is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.
ISBN 0-765-30046-X
First Edition: June 2003
0987654321
For Dave Baker,
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Contents
Prologue
T
HE
N
IGHT
I
T
WAS
,
OF
course, a dark and stormy night.
That was the way that his luck was running.
The gusty wind had let up — just for the moment, probably; life is like that — which merely made the hard rain beat straight down on him as Pirojil limped slowly through the mud down the Street of Two Dogs, looking for trouble.
But he wasn’t finding any, not tonight.
Unfortunately.
The dim light leaking out from the tavern windows was the only illumination, and it was scant illumination at that — but there wasn’t much to see, anyway, except for the rain and the mud, and that was hardly worth looking at, anyway.
He had already had to give up on the theater district, busy as it had been — and it had been busy:
Birth of an Empire
was still doing a full-house business at the House of Wise Tidings, night after night after night.
Pirojil didn’t understand that at all. He had finally forced himself to sit through the whole play; a mugger’s pouch had contained a couple of Karlsday Night tokens, and there was no need to let them go to waste. It made no sense that the playwright had received applause after the final curtain, instead of the rapidly thrown rotten fruit — or, better, rocks — that the idiot fully deserved.
It wasn’t just this one theater that was doing well, though. The other theaters were crowded, despite the fact that yet another had opened since the last time that Pirojil had been in the capital.
But, despite the threat of rain in the clouds and in the air that had become a promise too well kept, the streets in the theater district had been just this side of lined with not only the capital armsmen, but more than a few nobles’ guards. Pirojil had spotted some Imperials that he knew were from the Emperor’s Own — Silver Company, he thought, although with the recent shake-up, they could have been moved to Gold or Purple — which meant that the nobility attending theater tonight included more than just a few nobles minor, but some of the major landed nobility, as well.
Shit.
You could pretty much trust the old-line nobility to ruin a good thing, at least for a night. The theater district was often prime hunting ground for footpads and such, but tonight it had been far too well watched for the footpads’ purposes, or for Pirojil’s own.
So he had moved along, down to less well-off districts, and then the rain had finally hit, driving everybody indoors, apparently.
Rain.
It was more than unfortunate, worse than unfortunate — it was
unprofitable
, as well as being miserably cold and even more miserably wet, and he hoped that it wasn’t a harbinger of things to come. He would have to get used to doing this alone sooner or later, and to Pirojil’s way of thinking, later was usually worse than sooner.
He and Kethol and Erenor had, until recently, been supplementing their pay with the occasional footpad in much the same way that he and Kethol had when they were partnered with Durine. The Three Swords Inn — if there ever was a Three Swords Inn — would not be built with what three soldiers could save from their pay, despite Pirojil’s recent promotion to captain.
Biemestren’s wealth, and the trade constantly flowing in and out of the capital, supported the largest criminal class in the Empire, probably in the Middle Lands. You could hang all the thieves you wanted to in the square — and hangings were a standard part of Tenthday entertainment for the masses — but, as far as Pirojil could tell, all that really did was give the pickpockets and pouch slashers a distracted crowd in which to ply their trades.
It had always seemed to Pirojil and particularly to Durine amusing — not to mention profitable, although the profit was the entire point of the whole thing, after all, and the amusement just a bonus — to let that criminal class help support them.
After all, how could a robber complain about being robbed?
What were they going to do? Go pound on the door of the jail and ask the armsmen to arrest the erstwhile victims who, instead, had beaten the robbers and taken everything they had, from their pouches, to their knives, even to their brass belt buckles?
Biemestren armsmen, like armsmen everywhere, weren’t renowned for their senses of humor, and besides, Pirojil, Kethol, and Erenor had not lolled about at the scene of the crime either, as Biemestren armsmen probably wouldn’t have found their hobby terribly amusing — and neither would Baron Cullinane, which was only part of the reason the three of them had always been careful.
Jewelry was a problem only in that you could never get its full value — but the gems could be pried out and sold separately, and while it was always a shame to ruin some delicately crafted setting or pendant, it was also safer to simply melt it for the value of the gold or silver.
They had once managed to acquire a particularly gorgeous brooch, beautiful enough that Kethol had been tempted to find the rightful owner — some minor lord from Niphael, judging from the filigree work; it would have been easy to find out which visiting noble had been set upon that night — but, for once, it hadn’t taken much effort for Pirojil and Durine to talk him out of doing anything stupid.