Not Really the Prisoner of Zenda (3 page)

His pistols were still in his room, along with his rifle. It wasn’t just the weather, of course — gunshots would have been inconveniently noisy for the sort of thing that Pirojil had hoped to have done this wet, miserable, wet, wasted, wet night.

A freshly polished silver tea service stood on a table in the middle of the common area, and an ancient silver pot, tarnished almost black, was kept warm over a low oil flame. He poured himself a cup and sipped at it — it was stale, and the tannin made his lips pucker, but it wasn’t too bad — and added a splash of corn whiskey from a nearby cabinet, then gulped half of it down.

It burned his throat with only a gentle fire, and set up a pleasant warming in his gut. Both the whiskey and the tea were rather a lot better than he was used to. There were definitely some advantages to this new rank.

He sipped at the tea, made a face, then went back and, just for variety, retrieved a different mottled-glass bottle of whiskey, uncorked it, and took a drink directly from it. It burned as it went down, but not enough — somebody had been watering it.

Well, there were two ways to handle it. The simple way would be to just recork it and ignore it — it wasn’t his problem, after all.

Instead, he walked to the nearest garderobe and poured all the watered whiskey out, then refilled the bottle with water, and carefully scratched three wavy lines, the Erendra symbol for water, on the bottle. He set it out on the bar, as a warning to whoever was watering the whiskey.

The first bottle, though, was still fine.

Pirojil took another drink, and looked for a long time at the silver tea service, and thought about how, since he was leaving tomorrow, he could steal that — it was worth easily a hundred times what he had hoped to earn in the city, below — and he would be long gone before anybody else noticed that it was missing.

He held the teapot in his hands. The palms of his hands were thick with calluses, and as long as he didn’t use his relatively unmarked fingertips, it would warm him rather than burn him.

He
could
steal the pot, but of course he wouldn’t, so there was no point in tormenting himself with the thought. He was just being silly; he put the pot back down on its stand over the flame.

Pirojil was, after all, taking the Emperor’s pay, and while the stolen possessions of a footpad were fair game, he would no more steal from the Emperor than he would have stolen from the Cullinanes. Pirojil didn’t have many compunctions about a lot of things — he had had to lose all those a long time ago — but there were some things that he just wouldn’t do.

If you didn’t have loyalty, you didn’t have anything.

He walked to his room, closed the door and propped a chair in front of it, set his weapons out on the floor, next to the bed, where he could find them easily, and then lay down on the bed.

Sleep came quickly, as it usually did. Insomnia was another one of those luxuries that he had long been utterly unable to afford.

His sleep was filled with the screams of the dying, with visions of terrified white faces, round eyes, open mouths … and, always, always, the nauseating shit-stink of the freshly dead.

As usual.

Part 1

Opening Moves

1

T
HE
W
IDOW
’
S
W
ALK

Put three nobles in a room for lunch, and before the appetizers are served, you’ll have four conspiracies. At least.

— Walter Slovotsky

T
HE
WIND
HAD
begun to howl, threatening still more rain, but the Dowager Empress neither quickened nor slowed her already sodden pace.

Beralyn Furnael simply refused to be affected; it was no more and no less than that.

It wouldn’t have been accurate to say that threats meant nothing to her — in fact, the truth was entirely the opposite — but she was far too old, and had far too long been far too stubborn, to let anything as unimportant as the wind move her mind or her feet from any path she had set them on, even if that path was something as familiar and trivial as that of her nightly walk around the ramparts of Biemestren Castle.

Yes, there was some truth in what she said: that she needed her exercise, and that the moment that she permitted her traitor body to deny her that need, it would be time to have servants dig a deep grave, next to her husband’s, on the hilltop behind the castle that had been theirs, and lie down beside him for all of eternity.

Beralyn didn’t mind lying, but she didn’t believe in doing so promiscuously.

It was also true — at least when Parliament was in session, or when there were other visiting nobles, which was more common — that her nightly walks gave her son the opportunity to spend some private time with one or more of the lords’ and barons’ daughters who, through no coincidence, always seemed to be accompanying their fathers to Biemestren Castle.

None of them had any use for a useless old woman, after all. She would just be in the way.

There was always talk, of course, about how the visits were inspired by the cultural life in the capital, about how theater and music and generally better craftsmanship could be found here than out in the baronies, and such. All that was, of course, true enough, and perhaps more than a tiny proportion of the apparently empty-headed young twits really had that as a main reason for coming to Biemestren, unlikely as that seemed.

Their fathers, she was sure, invariably had other goals in mind. There were always commercial bargains to be made, and political ones, as well, besides the obvious hope: the grand prize. Her son. The Emperor.

An unmarried emperor was an obvious prize, as well as both an obvious and subtle threat, and the easiest way for any of the barons to simultaneously gain that prize and neutralize that threat was to have him marry into the baron’s family.

She wished one of them would succeed. Any one; it didn’t much matter to her, as long as the girl was fertile — and Beralyn would have the Spidersect priest make sure of that, while supposedly examining her for her virginity. Beralyn couldn’t have cared less about whether a young girl had spent her years keeping her knees together, or spreading them for every nobleman with a smooth smile — but whoever Thomen married had better be able to produce a son, and quickly, or the poor girl might just have an unfortunate accident, some dark night.

Hmm … it would be better, come to think of it, if Beralyn didn’t like the girl at first. While it wouldn’t make a whit of difference in what she did, it would bother her to push somebody she actually liked down the stairs.

Below, in the courtyard surrounding the donjon — what everybody else called the keep, or the Emperor’s House, although she preferred the older term — the remains of the Parliament encampment looked like what she remembered from her childhood as the remains of a party.

Biemestren Castle was large and roomy, certainly — easily four times the size of her late husband’s keep in Barony Furnael — but it had never been intended to accommodate a meeting of even all of the Biemish barons and their entourages, much less the Holts, as well.

So, once again, despite the local nobles minors’ homes being pressed into service, the castle had been painfully overcrowded and cramped during Parliament, and the kitchens had worked day and night to turn the constant flow of every sort of edible beast or vegetable imaginable through the castle gate into meals for those attending, while scullery men plied their trade behind the kitchens and beneath the castle’s garderobes to carry the refuse out.

Now it seemed almost empty, and she wondered why that bothered her.

All of the multicolored pavilions had been taken down, and the tents and floors packed away against the next Parliament. The sodden ashes of four cooking fires had yet to be removed from the gravel-covered grounds, and she frowned at that — with the kitchens working night and day, what had the barons needed with their own cooks and cook fires? What
were
those lazy scullery men doing?

It would all be cleaned up and gone within a few days; Beralyn would make sure of that. And then it would be absolutely empty.

No, it would just seem that way — the castle was really never empty of visitors.

There were always delegations from Nyphien and the other of the Middle Lands coming and going — for talks, they said, but mainly to spy — as well as engineers from the Home colony, and the occasional contingent from one or more of the dwarven countries, mainly Endell, always eager to trade for what they saw as the unceasing flow of good iron and better steel from what she still thought of as Adahan City, but which had been renamed New Pittsburgh back when that horrible Karl Cullinane had been emperor. She didn’t much like the people from Home — even apprentice engineers treated nobility with shocking informality, and Ranella, the Empire’s chief engineer, felt free to walk into Thomen’s presence whenever she felt like it — but Beralyn was willing to make allowances, given that it was the Home engineers who had built the blast furnaces in New Pittsburgh, and if the Emperor putting up with a few of the too-loud, too-self-assured swaggerers was part of the price, she could live with that.

And then there were the nobles minor, some from the Emperor’s own barony, but even more from Arondael, and Tyrnael, and Niphael, and every other of the Biemish baronies, and increasingly the Holtish ones. They would never have the status of the ancient noble lines, which were tied to landownership, but many of the upstart merchant lords were actually wealthier than all but the richest of the old nobility.

The Imperial court was not only the commercial heart of the Empire, but the social center, as well. Most of the time, at least a dozen of the local nobles minor would be playing host to at least one young visitor from an outlying barony, usually a younger son or daughter of a father who already had an heir, and who had come to the capital for any of the number of declared reasons, and never for the declared but usual reason of seeking some suitable mate, preferably one of good breeding, better lands, and even better wealth, but who often would happily settle on a marriage that would unite some portion of the merchant concerns of the nobles minor.

Ancient laws of primogeniture forbade the division of major nobles’ domains, but commercial enterprises were another matter.

It would be interesting to calculate how many marriages had been prematurely consummated — often marriages that had yet to be arranged — in the guest quarters of the donjon alone. And never mind how Lord Lerna’s house in Biemestren seemed to regularly have more action going on than a lowertown brothel on payday. There was something about the air in the capital, presumably, that prevented young noblewomen from visiting the Spider for the potions that would have prevented pregnancy.

Pity that Thomen’s own quarters were far too well guarded for that to happen there.

Yet another thing to blame Walter Slovotsky for, she decided.

Not that there weren’t enough already.

She looked out, past the town below, toward the dark horizon, and for a moment she thought she could see a speck that might be the dragon, Ellegon, carrying that horrible Jason Cullinane back toward what was now known as Barony Cullinane, but which, to her, would always be Barony Furnael.

No, it wasn’t. It was just some speck in her eye. Jason Cullinane and the dragon had left early in the morning, and were long gone.

She had heard that the dragon would soon be back to carry the new Baron Keranahan back to his barony, as well — the Cullinanes were awfully friendly with Forinel, suspiciously so — but any time that Ellegon was gone from Biemestren was a good time, from her point of view.

She had heard the dragon say, more than once, that it didn’t like peeling back the mind of somebody that it didn’t know, but that didn’t mean it was true, and she kept iron control over her thoughts whenever the dragon was around, just as she kept the same iron control over her actions at all times.

Jason Cullinane was gone, and he would not be back soon. Not gone nearly far enough, nor permanently enough, but there was nothing that she could do about that.

At the moment.

She shook her head as she walked. Others would say that Jason Cullinane had been generous in abdicating, in giving the Imperial crown to her son, Thomen, accepting only the Furnael barony in exchange. Others believed that Jason Cullinane meant what he said: that Thomen was better suited to rule the Empire of Holtun-Bieme than Jason was.

Others were fools.

There was nothing generous in it. Thomen
had
been running the Empire, while Jason Cullinane, then the heir apparent, gallivanted about the Middle Lands, enjoying himself. Thomen had not only deserved the crown by birth — he had
earned
the crown, by hard work, over years, serving first that horrible Karl Cullinane, and then as Regent for that even more dangerous Jason Cullinane.

She had discussed that with him, many times, and he had always said the same thing: “Well, then, Mother, you should be very happy, because now I
have
the crown.” And then, he would smile and would tap at the place on his forehead where the silver crown of Holtun-Bieme would rest on those rare state occasions when it was removed from the castle’s strong room.

He ignored the truth. That was all there was to it; he simply chose to ignore the truth.

Thomen could be very bloody-minded when it came to other matters of state — he was wisely resisting too quickly giving control of most of the Holtish baronies back to the barons, and he watched the Treasury very closely, not paying out good gold for works projects of questionable worth, insisting that the barons involved would have to fund the projected rail line between Adahan’s New Pittsburgh and Biemestren.

He even said that he had put off marrying for good reason, not out of a lack of time or interest. She believed that the way that little upstairs maid of his made a point of having difficulty sitting down most mornings was a reliable testament to his interest, just as Beralyn’s insistence that Derinald regularly take the girl to the Spider had proclaimed loudly to that little piece of common trash that there would be no question, ever, of a bastard to complicate matters.