The Curse of the Mistwraith (56 page)

The glitter made his head ache. Glass beading riddled the panelled walls, and gilt casements with rose-tinted panes clashed unmercifully with a floor laid out in tiles. These also were patterned, a blaring assemblage of lozenges done in saffron, amber and violet; the furnishings had raised knots in gold, every padded edge decked in silk twist and fringe. Even the carpets sported tassels.

A sortie from the bed to the privy would require lighted candles to forestall hooked toes and whacked shins.

Arithon shut his eyes and wished back the stark hills of Daon Ramon. The windswept ruins there at least kept the tatters of dignity.

‘You haven’t seen the fur quilts, yet,’ Asandir invited drily from the other side of the room. Against the chamber’s blinding opulence, his preferred midnight blue and silver made him grim as an aspect of Dharkaron dispatched to punish mortal vanity.

‘Excuse me.’ Arithon wished only to forget his first sight of Etarra; with copper-clad domes clustered thick as warts behind square bastions, the city resembled a fat toad squatted between weathered slate mountains. He sighed and reopened his eyes. ‘I presume Sethvir brought the records?’

‘If you can make out lettering between the flourishes affected by Etarra’s clerks,’ groused the Warden of Althain. Surrounded by leatherbound ledgers heaped in stacks in an alcove, he looked nothing less than besieged. ‘I hate to pain you further.’ He waved a haphazard scroll-case toward a pair of cherubs whose carved curls sprouted indigo candles. ‘But the lady of the house brought these when I asked for more light.’

‘Burn them, and the archives, too!’ Arithon’s laughter took on a baleful edge. ‘We’d save a lot of bother if we could level this atrocity and build a new city from the rubble.’

Sethvir waggled a quill pen at him. ‘Don’t imagine we haven’t been tempted!’ Then he blinked and looked vague and snapped his fingers: both cherub candles sprouted flame. The wax as it heated gave off a cloying perfume. A casement perforce was unlatched and in the draft, the new light wavered over features shaded toward concern. ‘A nasty night of reading for us both. You won’t like it. Etarran guilds resolve their disputes on the blades of hired assassins.’

Not too exhausted to field subtleties, Arithon hooked off his silver circlet. ‘How many wards of guard did you need to set over this room?’

Sethvir and Asandir exchanged a glance, but neither one gave him answer.

‘Never mind.’ Arithon hurled the royal fillet into the nearest padded chair. ‘If the governor’s council wants a knife in my back, by morning I’ll make them a reason.’

But reason had already been given, as the sorcerers had cause to know. They did not discuss the three paid killers who had earlier been unobtrusively foiled. The viper’s nest of factions that ruled the city stood united in their cause to see the s’Ffalenn royal line killed off. Vigilance over Arithon’s safety could never for a moment be relaxed.

For the rest of the afternoon and well on into evening, the Prince of Rathain and the sorcerers remained in seclusion, poring over old records. Dakar came back. An exhaustive tour of the taverns had affirmed his opinion that Etarra brewed terrible ale. Dispatched, staggering, to the scullery, he fetched back a light meal, chilled wine and candles from the servants’ wing that thankfully did not merit any scent. His errands finished, he sprawled full-length on the fur quilts, the boots he had forgotten to remove sticking through the rods of the bedstead.

At midnight, Lysaer stepped in, lightly flushed, a satisfied smile on his face. He hooked Arithon’s circlet off the chair, set it safely on a tortoiseshell sidetable, and sat. ‘Ath, this room is as overdecorated as the taproom I just came from.’ He sniffed, and grinning added, ‘It reeks in here like a brothel madam’s boudoir.’

Arithon baited blandly, ‘You should have been here when the candles were fresh. They would’ve given you an erection. And anyway, I’m surprised you can tell.’

At Lysaer’s mystification, Sethvir said, ‘You smell as if you bathed in cheap gin. By that, dare we presume you accomplished your assignment and lasted for the duration?’

Lysaer laughed. ‘When I retired, the elect of the guilds were banging their tankards on the table. The foppish-looking fellow who’s commander of Etarra’s guard was singing war-songs offkey and the barmaids were hoisting the Lord Governor into a brewer’s wagon to be delivered to the arms of his wife. Gentlemen, what news I have is good. Tomorrow would have brought foul and secret machinations against our prince, except that the messengers entrusted to spread word of the arrangements met with mishap. Kharadmon has an unsubtle touch, I must say, since one of them slipped in horse dung and apparently broke his elbow. His yelling disrupted half the prostitutes in the shanty district. The names he chose to curse at the top of his lungs were a frank embarrassment.’

‘That must have upset Commander Diegan’s sensibilities,’ Sethvir ventured, his head disappeared behind the pages of yet another yellowed ledger.

‘Oh yes.’ Lysaer forgot his distaste for orange tassels and tipped his head back into the chair cushions. ‘The Lord Commander of the Guard rousted out his head captain, Gnudsog, is it? The squat fellow with the muscles and the scars. He silenced the uproar with a battle mace by breaking the messenger’s jaw. The bonesetters are still busy. To mend appearances Etarra’s council will convene tomorrow morning behind barred doors, to formalize reformed laws to ban the monarchy. The guild ministers already bicker like fishwives. Hungover as they’re likely to become, they’ll lock horns over the language until noon.’

‘Oh dear.’ Sethvir forsook the accounts to jab fingers through a coxcomb of stray hair. ‘Are you saying you got them all in their cups?’

Dakar answered from the bed with his eyes still closed. ‘They were irked enough to dance on the tables, anyway. All Lysaer did was keep them filling their tankards.’

‘Who paid for the gin?’ asked Asandir.

‘That’s the beauty of it,’ Lysaer said, infectiously lapsed into merriness. ‘The tavern was owned by the vintner’s guild, and drinks were declared on the house.’

Lord Governor Morfett set the massive gold seal of the city into puddled scarlet wax. Then, while the guild ministers added their own signatures and ribbons, he shoved his knuckles into a fringe of damp hair and cradled his splitting head. A servant had to touch his sleeve twice before he realized: the pounding came from the doorway, echoing the throb inside his skull.

‘Let them in,’ he said through his palms. ‘The damned sorcerers can raise a commotion all they like. Our edict is signed into law, and their prince will be in irons by afternoon.’

A hagridden secretary scurried to unbar the door. He was all but knocked down as the panels burst inward, and a flood of agitated barristers barged through.

The newcomers started shouting all at once.

From the governor’s chair on the dais, Morfett screamed for order. By the time he made himself heard, his head was splitting. The councilmen around him were sweating or vainly covering their ears to ease their hangovers. Not a few looked ready to be sick.

When the men could be made to speak in more orderly fashion, their complaints added up to disaster.

The sorcerers and their prince had spent an industrious morning, beginning with a review of Etarra’s condemned. By the tenets of Rathain’s royal charter, it transpired that two thirds of the city’s prisoners were wrongfully tried and sentenced.

‘Pardons and reprieves from execution!’ Morfett howled.

‘Worse,’ a clerk interrupted. ‘The prince has also vouched treasury funds for reimbursement of unfair fines.’

‘His mother-accursed royal Grace can’t do that!’ Morfett jumped to his feet. ‘A Teir’s’Ffalenn has no
right
to set his seal to any documents unless and until there’s a coronation. The decrees are false! No such ceremony has been ratified!’

‘No,’ corrected Etarra’s seneschal sadly. He looked and sounded like a kicked hound. ‘But he could, and did, post documents that name the prisoners to be acquitted on the day he’s invested as high king.’

‘Along with which laws will be repealed, which taxes, eliminated and how many public servants shall be relieved from their posts without pay!’ This inveigling was worse than the feud ongoing between the ironmongers and the furniture-joiners, who captured and tortured each other’s apprentices to blackmail concessions for trade secrets. Morfett slammed his fists on the high table, spattering ink and official wax over mother of pearl inlay. ‘Is this what you’ve come here to tell me?’

Amid cringing rows of officials, not one met their Lord Governor’s furious outburst.

‘Dharkaron take you for a pack of piddling puppies!’ Morfett stuck out his hand toward his commander of the guard. ‘Give me our new writ! Then go at once and tell Gnudsog to muster a squad of enforcers. I’ll see that s’Ffalenn bastard in chains and flogged for fomenting insurrection. Fiends and Ath’s fury, no meddling Fellowship sorcerer’s going to raise a hand to stop me!’

‘No sorcerer will, but your people might,’ a voice volunteered from the entry. Sethvir stepped inside, bemused as a philosopher given new audience for his theories. ‘Have you been listening?’ He pushed the outer door panels open.

A wave of sound reverberated into the council hall. The mob in the streets beyond the antechamber were not outraged, but cheering, and against any law of nature, Sethvir’s mild tone carried clearly over the din. ‘Rumours spread that your ministers met to outlaw the royal charter. To keep an irate mob of farmers from storming your doors and tearing your councilmen limb from limb, the First City Alderman suggested the contrary; that the documents being drawn were in fact an abdication of the guilds from ruling power and an affirmation of s’Ffalenn right of sovereignty. Craftsmen and labourers took to the streets in celebration. The North Gate belltowers play carillons and the shanty-district whores are throwing posies. If you end this session without a writ for a royal coronation, your people of Etarra are going to riot.’

‘Let them!’ Diegan’s rebuttal rang like a whipcrack over the noise. ‘I’d rather find myself lynched than bend my knee to any high king.’

He made as if to push past, but the dignitaries beside him caught his wrists. There were others of the council not so staunch. Should the mobs turn lawless in the streets, the city guard could not stay them. Looting would be followed by bloodshed and the damage to trade would be incalculable. Pressured to give in by a mournful flock of peers, the Lord Governor of the city waved for Diegan to subside. Then he sat down abruptly with his knuckles jammed against his teeth. Today the sorcerers’ timing had them beaten. But the Fellowship could hardly shepherd the stew of Etarra’s politics indefinitely. Best to accept this defeat and save resources to upset s’Ffalenn rule another day. On the floor, trodden under the milling feet of the pedigreed elect of Etarra, the morning’s brave warrant to arrest the prince came to an ignominious end.

Diegan tugged free of the dignitaries, unpacified. ‘It won’t be that easy,’ he lashed at Sethvir. ‘The rabble might love the idea of a high king today. But when unrest drives them to turn, no blandishments your prince can offer will appease them.’

‘Blandishments?’ Sethvir looked thrilled as a madcap apothecary prepared to make gold from plain clay. ‘I rather thought his Grace would give them back their chartered freedom.’

Diegan’s lip curled in a snarl. Blithe as the Warden of Althain could appear, as much as he seemed a doddering elder of a stripe to knot strings around his wrists to nudge a senile memory, he was no such vague old fool.

He had Etarra’s council at bay and he knew it.

But his position was dangerously precarious. Moment to moment, any of a thousand missed details could erupt into bloody uprising as upheaval gave rise to panic. The citizens outside the council hall were far from tranquil, nowhere near under control. Only the poor and the disaffected roamed the streets. Sensible citizens of stature had barricaded their families inside their houses in dread. The Fellowship’s straits were not invisible. They could not be everywhere. Even as the governor’s council drafted their formal abdication, Diegan continued to collect reports.

Guilds were seizing the disruption as cover to wage less covert rivalries; five men of good families lay dead from unmarked knives. Asandir was busy protecting the moneylender who funded the treasury’s bottomless capacity to dispense bribes from a stone-throwing mob, who protested paying taxes for usury. Traithe, at the south ward armoury, barred Gnudsog’s deputies from the spare weapons stores while, impervious to attempts by all three fraternities of assassins, Arithon was being fitted for dress-boots by Etarra’s most fashionable cobbler.

The discorporate mages Kharadmon and Luhaine assuredly were behind the royal luck.

Before the wax on the writs that confirmed s’Ffalenn right of sovereignty grew cool, and despite the frustrated opposition of a governor’s council hazed like smoke-driven wasps, his Grace emerged in princely splendour to read the Royal Charter of Rathain in the square before the guild-halls. This time, the ceremony was engineered with enough glitter to make even Etarran excess seem drab.

Afterward, the populace could speak of nothing else.

The only man in the city less pleased than the Lord Governor and Etarra’s commander of the guard was Arithon s’Ffalenn himself. Set on display before the throng, he had managed his part as a musician might play to a rowdy taproom. Viewed as saviour by the poor, unrelentingly hated by the trade-guilds, he weathered the feast that followed less masterfully. Mantled in the green, black and silver of the s’Ffalenn royal blazon, he mingled awkwardly with a merchant aristocracy of faddish extremes. The fine food and wines did not distract them from their newest pleasure, which primarily consisted of prince-baiting. Intrigue poisoned the simplest word of courtesy, and while some wives and ladies battled for the chance to ingratiate, they had sharp, cunning minds that searched also for weaknesses to exploit.

This was a city where children were urged to select their playfellows according their parents’ rank and importance, and who were often as not sent out visiting with instructions to overhear all they could of the affairs of their schoolmates’ fathers.