Sliding Void (5 page)

***

It came as a considerable surprise to Calder that he was actually able to open his eyes. Every muscle in his body felt as though it had been expertly filleted, dragged out of his flesh, and run through a mangle before being carelessly shoved back into his carcass. Groaning and trying to hold down the vomit inside his gut, he opened his eyes.
I might have known
. Standing in front of his cot with arms on both hips, studying Calder’s agony, was that bastard wizard, Matobo the Magnificent.

‘Those flying fire beetles were yours?’ asked the prince.

‘Don’t be overwhelming me with your gratitude, boy,’ said Matobo. ‘There were another two companies of the baron’s guard fast on the heels of those pretty boys I saved you from.’

‘Saved me? I feel like I’ve been fried in whatever corner of hell you summoned that pair of flying monsters from.’

‘I had to put the zap on you and your friend. Those stretcher legs on my… flying beetles, weren’t going to hold your weight so good if you took in your mind to start struggling.’

Calder tried to sit up. He stared out of one of the room’s narrow stained glass windows. It looked like the capital outside. Late evening. He was home. ‘Am I inside your tower?’

‘Where else? My pets landed you and Jeeves down here yesterday. You’ve been sleeping for a while now. You don’t need to worry about any of the generals in what used to be your army coming knocking for you, though. I implanted a false memory in the mind of one of the shield-warriors that wasn’t turned into a Roman Candle by your exploding oil well. After I put a match to the oilfield, I left him thinking you and Jeeves were crispy critters.’

‘Who is Jeeves?’

‘Your family retainer, boy.’

‘That’s Noak. He’s alive too?’

‘Yeah, I was feeling generous.’

Calder’s hand snaked down to his leg. Calder’s trousers had been removed along with his tunic, and he was wearing some kind of white dressing gown cut from a material that seemed impossibly light and soft, yet as warm as a bearskin jacket. And even more impossibly, his leg seemed in perfect working order. The skin where the crossbow bolt had slammed through muscle and bone was red and slightly itchy, but apart from that, as good as new. He touched his chin. Someone had shaved him. An expert barber too, his cheeks felt as clean as a babe’s. ‘By the gods, does your sorcery know no bounds?’

‘One of the advantages of working with me, your highness, is you get full medical.’

‘Yet you don’t have a poultice capable of healing wounds without leaving my head feeling like hell’s own hangover?’

‘That’s the effect of a different potion you’re feeling, nothing to do with your injuries. Just a little something to help you on your way.’

Calder felt a shiver of fear as he saw that the wizard’s familiar – a large black hunting hound – slip through an open door into the stone bedchamber. Whenever some fool called into question Matobo’s mastery over sorcery, the wizard would mumble a spell over his dog, and then the hound would speak, converse with the doubter as if the animal was a human. Calder had seen this magic many times with his own eyes. Matobo would then smile menacingly as he informed the sceptic that the hound had once been a merchant who had cheated him, and explain how he turned the trader into a dog for the crime. It wasn’t a trick of ventriloquism, either. The wizard could walk a mile away, and the cursed dog would still plead with you to save it from its evil master.

‘You can keep on feeling generous, wizard. I’ll need your sorcery to sneak me into the palace, and then I’m going to carve out the skull of every member of the Privy Council that supported my removal.’

Matobo sighed. ‘Magic I may be, but suicidal I am not. Every nation on the continent knows that you’ve been removed from the throne, and there’s no spell of forgetfulness big enough to fix that. A few palace guards I can handle, the army of mercenaries and foreign shield-warriors your princess has brought to the party is another matter.’ He turned to his familiar. ‘Let my friends in.’ He looked down at Calder again as the hound trotted obediently out. ‘I’ve got alternative arrangements for you. I’m going to send you to a place where the price on your head won’t mean a whole lot. As you might imagine, that’s pretty damn far away.’

‘This is where I was born, this is where I will die,’ Calder insisted. ‘It is my birthright. Sibylla will see me. She’ll help me regain my throne.’

‘You think so?’ He rummaged around in the pockets of his purple robes, digging out a tiny globe the size of a marble.

‘Is that your crystal ball? It looks too small to see into the future.’

Matobo grunted. ‘Even better. This shows you the past, kid. At least, it does when it scurries into the right room and its cameras are working properly.’

He mumbled something at the globe and it unfurled into a spider-like creature. The little metal beast flexed its pincers, rising up on its hind legs, as if begging Matobo the Magnificent for food. The wizard whispered at it again. ‘Sibylla surveillance file. Six days ago. Central bedchamber.’ At his command a flat square of light formed above the spider, little black lines flickering down the brightness until a picture appeared, like a priest’s illumination on parchment. It was a perfect picture, though, capturing Sibylla’s gorgeous flawless skin as if Calder were spying on the scene through a keyhole. Sadly, the flawless picture came with perfect sound too. Sibylla was naked and writhing in the arms of someone else he recognized, the high marshal of the Narvalak army.
If it’s a pardon she’s earning, she needn’t enjoy it so much.

‘The baron has promised the priests they’ll be given the prince alive,’ said the high marshal. ‘I can have the boy brought here for you to see, if you want.’

‘Why would I want that?’ asked Sibylla. ‘Your cardinal needs Calder for burning. It’ll be quicker if you ship him straight back to your country. Bringing him to the capital will only encourage any dissidents left alive. Let Calder’s future be written across the sea and out of sight of the peasants here.’

The high marshal scratched his naked scarred ass. ‘I thought you might want to slip him a vial of poison for old time’s sake. In my land his end will not be quick, or that which a warrior deserves.’

‘The cardinal will hardly trust me if I can’t even send him a single deposed royal. You told me he values competence above all.’

The soldier stroked Sibylla’s spine as he shrugged. ‘As you wish.’

Calder’s fist punched through the scene, the hairs on his arm painted with the light of his now definitely ex-fiancée’s coupling as the conversation died away to be replaced by moans of pleasure. ‘Make it stop.’

‘I warned you,’ said the sorcerer. ‘When you lit out of here with your army and your fleet, you weren’t going to war, you were creating a vacancy. And nature does so abhor a vacuum. Especially when it’s the nature of your perfect, pampered princess.’

‘Has your Seeing Eye truly shown me the truth?’

Matobo pushed the spider into a tiny sphere and tossed it to him to catch as if it was a child’s marble. ‘The kind of truth that opens your eyes. Guess this game hasn’t worked out for either of us.’

‘You still have your powers and position,’ said Calder, bitterly. ‘What am I left with? Ashes and the taste of shit in my mouth.’

‘If it’s any consolation, I am going to have to pack up here too. Leastwise out of your country. It’s getting mighty tiresome scraping your ex-girlfriend’s assassins off my courtyard every morning.’ Matobo wiggled his fingers mysteriously. ‘And who knows, sooner or later one of those suckers might get lucky. And as someone a lot wiser than me once said, old Matobo’s going to have to be lucky all time. Sibylla’s people only got to get lucky once.’

Calder managed to push himself up and stay sitting on the cot, gathering the sheets around his body. ‘There is nowhere so distant that it will be out of reach of Narvalak’s fleet.’

‘You’ll be surprised. I got me a friend with a real special schooner.’ Behind the wizard, the door opened, two people entering the bedchamber along with the wizard’s canine familiar. One of them was a woman, every bit as handsome as Sibylla, although in the newcomer’s case, the pert superiority of the princess had been traded for a more overt round-faced curiosity. The woman was not richly dressed. A single-piece green suit that looked like a washerwoman’s overalls, marked with an oval heraldic emblem on her shoulder, the garment’s material stiff and strong like sail fabric. Her companion, though, was a real oddity. Tall and spindly, he wore an identical set of overalls, but covering metallic gold skin, as if he’d been gilded as a babe in the precious metal. His face appeared noble and slightly pained, with an exotic cast about it that went beyond the sheen of his golden skin. Even queerer was his hair – not hair at all, but a close brush of wire, also gold, like a plate-armoured knight with a moulded helm.

‘This is the man?’ asked the woman in a low, smoky voice.

‘Prince Calder Durk,’ said the wizard. ‘Meet Lana Fiveworlds, captain of that special schooner I was telling you about. Her friend is Zeno, works as the first mate on said ship.’

‘You want me to take passage with a female master?’ spat Calder in disbelief, staring at the odd man standing beside her.

‘Stow that shit,’ advised the wizard. ‘And it isn’t just passage she’ll be offering you. It’s a job on her schooner too.’

Lana ignored Calder’s anger, reaching down to scratch the head of the wizard’s hound. ‘You still with this old reprobate, Buddy? Thought you might have traded up to a better class of master by now?’

‘Pah,’ said the dog, half a resigned growl of agreement.

‘My hound,’ said Matobo.

Calder shivered in superstitious fear. ‘You expect me to demean myself by working as a common sailor, wizard? I have the honour of my house to uphold. You cannot mean me to flee my own land in this pauper manner?’

‘You call this a
little
favour?’ laughed Lana Fiveworlds. ‘Taking his neo-barbarian slipped-back ass on the
Gravity Rose
? Is the man even housetrained? Shit, it’ll be quicker teaching that pet monkey of Polter’s to be crew. What kind of retards were his ancestors anyway, settling on this bastard world?’

‘Wasn’t their fault,’ said Matobo. ‘Didn’t you read the wiki on this world? The first settlers came in racked, stacked and packed on coffin ships. Overpopulation excess, poor as dirt. Too poor to pay for a decent survey of the Hesperus system. When they set down, this world was a paradise. Forty years later the interglacial ended, and a full-bore ice age started. I still have the original brochure from nine hundred years ago. Fragrant pine forests and sandy beaches. Of course, the settlers were too poor to afford a mass lift-out from Hesperus, even if they could have found a civilised planet willing to stamp a quarter of a million no-money colonists’ entry visas. The mining combine backing them shrugged its shoulders, pointed to the emigration indemnity waiver and walked. So here their descendants stay, and here they shiver.’

‘Jeez,’ said the strange gold-skinned sailor. ‘You just have to look at the forests here. Steel-tough trees you need a plasma cutter to fell. Any biologist worth a shit in the park could’ve told you what kind of weather pattern that’s going to mean. Wasn’t any beach and bikini settlement.’

‘You got that right,’ the wizard turned back to Calder. ‘This is how it is, your highness. Exile is never easy. Take it from someone who can’t go home himself. But it’s either my friends here, or execution by burning if you stay. Trust me, working as crew isn’t as bad as it sounds. Not when you’re on a magic vessel.’

Calder was feeling recovered enough from his injuries for a flash of anger towards the sorcerer. ‘Trust you! The last time you asked me to trust you, all I ended up losing was my love, my kingdom, my crew, my ship, and now my honour.’

‘You put it like that,’ said Lana Fiveworlds, ‘and I might start liking you. What with us having so much in common and all.’

The golden sailor, Zeno, laughed. ‘Anyone who’s met Rex Matobo has that story in common. You should be ashamed of your flammy ass, old man, coming down here and pulling your Wizard of Oz scam on this failed world.’

The wizard raised his hands placatingly. ‘It was for the locals’ good. Could’ve got them real organized if the horse I’d backed came in. This place is mineral rich. Drag it back to the carbon age, set up a freight sling in orbit, and the same mining combine that dumped this hole would be clamouring for cargo boosts from us. Give it a hundred years and we’d be streaming out minerals, a line of solar sails so tight that traffic control would need an upgrade to handle them. And best of all, you do the mining here old school-style, and you’d be pumping out so much CO2 that soon enough the place’ll be global warming itself back to short sleeves and cocktails by the beach.’

‘Yeah,’ said Lana Fiveworlds, ‘you’re a real philanthropist, Rex. But seeing as how the reality is you’ve got everyone here all steamed up at you, same as normal, how come you’re not running out and taking prince charming with you? I pegged your ship in a crater on the moon, stashed under a stealth web.’

‘My ship’s a fine craft, but she’s not much bigger than a shuttle,’ said Matobo. ‘And I’ve still got bounty hunters trying to collect on the warrants on my head.’

‘Strange that,’ said Lana. ‘How everyone who you ‘help’ always seems to end up on the lam with a lynchmob a couple of steps behind them.’