The Palace (Bell Mountain Series #6) (2 page)

Grammum and Master Harfydd came out to the street together. They stopped by the cart and held each other’s hands.

“Stay, Nywed. Please stay.”

“Why don’t you come with us, Harfydd?”

He smiled meekly. Grammum knew he couldn’t just up and leave his business. She wasn’t being fair to him, Enith thought.

“I’ll write to you, once we get there,” Grammum said. Considering it was Master Harfydd who’d lent them the cart and the driver, and never asked a penny for it, he ought to get more of a reward than just a letter, Enith thought.

“My travels sometimes take me up the river,” he said. “Maybe I’ll stop in and see you after you’re settled down.”

“That’d be nice.”

Grammum gave him a peck on the cheek and spryly scrambled up to her seat on the cart before he could say anything more. Enith allowed him to help her up to her seat.

“Thank you, Master Harfydd,” she said.

“Take good care of your grandmom, Enith—and of yourself, too.”

The driver whistled and flicked his whip, and at a slow and steady pace consented to by the mules, they were off.

Off, thought Enith, to a stupid nothing little town called Ninneburky, where nothing ever happened and she would die of boredom.

While Enith and her grandmother were moving, the king’s council—minus the king and with no desire ever to see the king again—met behind closed and guarded doors in the chamber that used to belong to the High Council of the Oligarchs. The members of that council had all been killed in the war, except for Lord Chutt who ran away. Lord Ruffin, the governor-general, used to sit at the head of the exquisitely polished table. Now a man named Merffin Mord sat there. He did not call himself governor-general, but as the richest and most ambitious of the group, he acted as its leader. All six of them were held to be equal in authority, but if the truth be known, it was Merffin Mord whose ideas had gotten them into the palace in the first place.

At the moment he was angrily glaring up and down the long table, with his five colleagues glaring back at him.

“I have only misplaced the letter,” he was saying, “and I’m sure I’ll find it soon. But I can’t order my servants to look for it, can I? Better it stay lost, than one of them should find it!”

“Maybe one of them has already found it,” said a thin, sour-faced, grey-bearded man named Aggo. You’d never guess him for a wine merchant, but that’s what he was. “You should have burned the letter, Merffin.”

“That is a singularly unhelpful remark, my friend!”

“Well, I don’t see how we can reply to the letter while it’s just floating around somewhere.”

“Gentlemen, please!” spoke up a third councilor, a little bald man. “We’re all in the same boat, and arguing among ourselves will get us nowhere.”

“Councilor Hendy, you never spoke a truer word,” Merffin said. “I’ll find the letter myself, never fear. In the meantime, we ought at least to be in agreement as to what our answer shall be—to accept the offer, or not to accept it.”

“If we don’t accept, our days are numbered,” Aggo said.

“But if we do, and anything goes wrong, we’re all as good as dead,” said a fourth councilor, Frandeval Forr. The youngest of the group, and the only fair-haired man among them, Frandeval was the richest moneylender in Obann, having inherited the business from his father. All of the other councilors owed him money. “And we still have no certain knowledge of what has become of the king. We can hardly leave that out of our reckoning!”

Merffin Mord glared at everyone again. He was sure of the support of only two of them—Ilas, the Cloth King (as he liked to call himself), and Redegger, who controlled most of the vice and gambling in the city—and both of them were sitting there saying nothing, like a couple of shy schoolgirls. The loss of the letter had very badly shaken them.

“We may as well adjourn the meeting,” Merffin said. “Maybe overnight I’ll find the letter—and some of us will find their nerve.”

“It’s no use trying to bait me, Merffin,” Aggo said. “If you can find the letter, I’ll vote to accept. If you can’t, I’ll wash my hands of the whole business.”

And one of these days, thought Merffin, even as he smiled at the man, I’ll wash my hands of you.

The councilors would have been frantic had they known that, even as they spoke, someone was making copies of the letter.

The Great Hall of the Oligarchs—they called it the Palace now, even with the king gone—was an enormous building. Only the Temple was bigger, but the Temple lay in ruins. In addition to its meeting halls, audience chambers, and conference rooms, the Palace included offices, kitchens, living quarters, stables, storerooms, workshops, a smithy, a wine cellar, and labyrinths of attics and cellars. The rulers of Obann had been building onto it for centuries. No one knew how many clerks, cooks, watchmen, grooms, maids, servants, washerwomen, and fetchers and carriers worked there. Some lived all their lives within its walls.

Gallgoid the Spy, a servant of the king and for long an assassin and a poisoner in the service of the Temple, operated in the palace like a spider—silent, unnoticed, with a forgotten storeroom as his office and his home. His agents in the Palace served food, dusted bedchambers, mopped floors, acted as valets, and told him everything they saw and heard.

One of the king’s council was his agent, too—a man loyal to King Ryons. Only Gallgoid knew which councilor it was. Thanks to this man, Gallgoid quickly came to hear of the letter and so arrange for it to be stolen from Merffin Mord’s own bedchamber: for Gallgoid had agents among the councilors’ own households.

This was the letter he was copying, and this is what it said:

Goryk Gillow, First Prester

By the ordination of His Universal Majesty, King Thunder,

Lord of the New Temple:

To the High Council of Obann,

& to His Lordship Merffin Mord—

Greetings!

My lords, His Universal Majesty inquires to know the purpose of the most irregular & unlawful election of the traitor, Orth, as First Prester of the Temple in Obann. My lords, how can such things be? For there is no Temple in Obann.

In the late war between us, this Orth conspired with Lord Reesh, then First Prester, to betray your city to our army. They admitted some of our servants into the Temple by a secret passage, & so the Temple was burned with fire & destroyed.

Which was clean against our wishes.

We have erected to the God of Obann the New Temple at Kara Karram, so that it should be the place where all nations shall honor the God of Obann; & we have named our servant, Goryk Gillow, First Prester.

If it be your intention to reject our Temple & our First Prester, well: let there be war between us, instead of peace.

But if it be your desire to accept our friendship, then you must accept our First Prester & acknowledge the sole authority & primacy of the New Temple.

We urge you to make your intentions clearly known, & that without delay.

So speaks His Universal Majesty.

Also, my lords, I regret to inform you that our punitive expedition to Lintum Forest had no success: & also that the villainous & lowborn Helki, the Outlaw, has found a boy whom he proclaims to be King Ryons. Of this we have sure intelligence by many who have fled Lintum Forest and taken refuge at Silvertown, under our protection.

Beware this treason which is hatched in Lintum Forest.

By Goryk Gillow, First Prester,
etc.

“Very skillfully played!” said Gallgoid under his breath. This Goryk Gillow had no Temple training, but he seemed to have a gift for the game of treason.

Copies of the letter would be sent to Helki and the king in Lintum Forest, to Prester Jod and Gurun in Durmurot, and to Preceptor Constan and First Prester Orth here in the city. Gallgoid would advise them to be quiet and do nothing until a plan of action could be laid. Besides, there was no telling how the people of the city might react. They liked the king, Gallgoid thought, but didn’t altogether believe in him as the king ordained for them by God and the true descendant of Ozias. They weren’t sure what they believed about him. And the loss of the Temple, for all the people of Obann, was a raw and angry wound that wouldn’t heal.

Last of all, Gallgoid would arrange for the original letter to be returned to Merffin Mord’s bedchamber, where Mord would eventually discover it and never know it had ever left the room.

“It’d be so much easier just to poison them all,” he said. Over the past few months he’d gotten into the habit of talking to himself. There was no one to overhear. “Only I can’t, of course.” That was because the little prophetess, Jandra, when she was leaving the city to return to Lintum Forest, had turned to him and said, “The Lord is with you, Gallgoid. Sin no more.” So he abandoned the thought of doing away with Merffin Mord in some unobtrusive manner. He hadn’t assassinated anyone since then.

At High Market Square, where once the city’s rulers hanged a prophet, a crowd had gathered to hear First Prester Orth dedicate a memorial stone to all the prophets. A delegation of the city’s clergy sat behind him on the platform as he spoke.

“Let this stone be a witness against us to our sin,” he was saying, “and call us to perpetual repentance. For we have been no better than our fathers, who slew the prophets in their time.

“Hear the Scripture: ‘Thus saith the Lord: If my people humble themselves before Me, and repent, and depart from their evil ways, I will take their sins away, and heal them.’ This is our hope, our only hope.”

Behind him, silent, unmoving, sat Preceptor Constan, who directed the immense project of making the Scriptures available to all the people. Since the winter, the presters and reciters in the city, and throughout Obann, had been preaching to the people from the Holy Scriptures, from the Old Books themselves. This was a new thing. Copies of the books were being sent to all the chamber houses in Obann, as fast as Constan’s scribes and seminary students could copy them. Thus were the people to be instructed not in men’s word anymore, but in God’s. Copies were now being made in a few of the other cities. Most of the people of Obann had never heard the actual Scriptures—not in all their lives.

Constan wondered how many of them knew that Orth had been Lord Reesh’s chief confederate in betraying the city to the Heathen—a scheme that was thwarted only by the sudden arrival of King Ryons and the giant beast. Orth had confessed his sin to the College of Presters. They would not let him confess it to the people. But the people know, thought Constan: they must surely know by now. What kept them from rising up against the presters, Constan didn’t know. The city was like a lion crouching in the tall grass, unseen, before springing on its prey with a paralyzing roar.