The Tattered Banner (Society of the Sword Volume 1) (23 page)

It forced them to push their plan for Chancellor Marin forward. Thankfully, however, it appeared that Emeric was not one to wait for necessity to dictate his actions. Ever since they had arrived, he had been sneaking out of their room for an hour or two each night and exploring the Palace. For obvious reasons it was too risky for him to draw up maps, but he had made detailed observations and could recollect them accurately.

He knew the locations of all of the rooms belonging to the senior members of the Prince’s council, which rooms were unused, and most importantly, the numbers and routes of the nocturnal guard patrols through the Palace. Soren had to admit that he was impressed by the thoroughness of Emeric’s intelligence gathering and the unadorned practicality with which he approached the matter was far more enlightening than a year’s instruction on the subject at the Academy.

Chancellor Marin was old and portly. He had been seen to have a vigorous appetite and a fondness for wine and ale at the formal dinners and as such was a prime candidate for a heart attack.

Killing a man of Marin’s position was delicate. He exerted considerable influence over the Prince and was apparently alone among the Prince’s ministers in opposing Amero’s treaty. If the assassination were to go wrong, the consequences would be catastrophic. All three of them would be executed and in all likelihood the two countries would go to war. However he died, it must appear to have either been accidental beyond suspicion, or of natural causes. His dying at such an inopportune time would certainly give rise to questions, so there was no room for any error that could lead to further suspicions.

Amero decided that staging a heart attack was really the only option available to them considering the time frame. Murder by a jealous whore or mistress was always a convenient way to get an aristocrat out of the way Amero had said, but sadly there simply wasn’t the time to set it up. Soren and Emeric would have to sneak into Chancellor Marin’s apartments and administer a suitable poison that would precipitate a heart attack. They would then have to return to their own apartments undetected. It seemed a simple enough concept, but Soren knew there were many things that could go wrong.

A staged mugging on a night time street would have been far more to Soren’s taste. He disliked using poison and had limited experience of it. It was considered a less than honourable way to kill, and certainly not one to be utilised by a banneret, so his lessons at the Academy had only given it the most cursory of appreciations. He knew what the major poisons were, and what they did, but the Academy had instilled in him a sense that a blade was the only acceptable way to dispatch someone in a clandestine fashion. Nonetheless, needs dictated otherwise.

The poison that was most suited to their purpose was simple and called the Queen of Poisons. It had many advantages as an assassin’s poison. It was undetectable, was absorbed through the skin, and caused heart attacks. It was perfect for their purpose, and with great forethought, Emeric had included it in the secret case of poisons hidden in his trunk.

The greatest advantage it offered was that it did not have to be directly administered. They could apply it to his bed sheets or nightclothes at any time, and allow the poison to do its work while they were elsewhere, preferably in plain view of others. As if this was not enough, once exposed to the air, the poison began to break down. By morning, when the Chancellor’s body was discovered, the poison would have degraded to a non-lethal form, and the servants handling the sheets and body would be unaffected.

This was the plan that was decided upon. Soren and Emeric would enter the Chancellor’s apartments and liberally coat his nightshirt with poison. Before morning, he should have absorbed enough of it to cause heart failure. If everything went to plan, it would appear that an old, overweight man had died in his sleep.

Carrying out the assassination proved easy enough. For whatever reason, during the day there were very few patrols through the inside of the Palace; virtually all the guards were on the exterior. The Chancellor’s apartments were empty and likewise unguarded. Emeric and Soren sneaked into the apartment. Soren carefully applied the poison on the nightshirt that had been left folded on the Chancellor’s bed as Emeric had instructed, using a brush and thick leather gloves so as to ensure none of the lethal liquid came in contact with his skin.

In only a few minutes, they were done. Soren felt a giddy excitement but forced it down. They would have to wait until the following morning to discover if they were successful, but the danger of being discovered had passed. The sense of purpose and power that Soren felt afterward was almost overwhelming. That he, a former street urchin, could dictate the future of two countries with his actions was intoxicating. He wished he had been able to do it with his sword though, rather than in the less than honourable fashion with poison.

News of the death of Chancellor Marin spread quickly about the Palace the following morning and was greeted with great sadness. While the hunting trip was to go ahead, the Prince and the senior members of the court would be remaining behind. Amero had congratulated Soren on a job well done at breakfast that morning, but he had not seen him since. There was great excitement surrounding the departure of the hunting party, coupled with mourning in some sections of the court. It appeared that Marin had been very popular with some, and resented by others. Either way, Soren had done his duty and successfully completed his mission. He was comfortable in the thought that the threat Chancellor Marin had represented to Ostia was now gone.

He awoke with a start in the carriage on the morning of their second day travelling north. As a foreign dignitary he had been given a carriage to himself, which he was grateful for as it allowed him to stretch out and sleep for most of the journey. He opened the shutter and window on the door to peer out, and was amazed to see the entire landscape covered in a blanket of white. His breath formed a cloud as it floated out of the window, while the fresh air coming in was freezing cold and dry. He coughed slightly at first until his lungs grew accustomed to the crisp bite, but his attention was completely monopolized by the fairy-tale landscape.

The wheels of the carriage made a ‘shushing’ sound as they ploughed through the churned up snow that had been left behind by the carriages and horses in front. Despite the cold, Soren could not stop himself from leaving the window open and revelling in the way the chilly air felt against his skin and in his lungs. He took in all the majesty of the snow covered scenery, as thick forest broke to allow craggy snow covered peaks burst through and reach up so high Soren had to stick his head out of the window and look almost directly up to see the sky.

After an hour or so more, the carriages bumped to a halt and Soren jumped out. His boots hit the snow and crunched and squeaked their way down until the snow had compressed to a solid base beneath them. He reached down and took a handful of the light powdery substance and was surprised to see how dry it was initially, until the warmth of his hand began to melt it.

‘Well, what do you think?’ Alys had gotten out of her carriage in front and her ladies were fussing over cloaks and fur wraps behind her.

‘It’s fantastic!’ Soren shouted back, a smile splitting his face from ear to ear. He looked back at the handful of snow, which was now no more than a puddle of slush dripping between his fingers. He could not help but feel a childish excitement and curiosity at the alien environment.

He jumped as he was hit in the face with a slapping thud of snow. He cleared it from his face in bewilderment. The cold burned his skin in a strange but not entirely unpleasant way. As his vision cleared, he saw Alys standing a few yards away, laughing furiously, her hands red from the cold of the snow she had just been holding.

‘I’m glad you like it!’ she shouted back between laughs.

Soren continued to scoop snow from his ears, mouth and nose, noticing that the blanket of snow seemed to dull all ambient sound, giving the moment an incredible sense of peace and serenity. It was like nothing he had ever experienced, and he loved it.

C h a p t e r   2 2

THE HUNT

T
he Summer Palace was true to Ruripathian fashion and was a magnificent building. It seemed to be an attempt to blend opulence with a rustic charm that gave it a different, more relaxed character to the buildings in the city, but that was not to say it was any less impressive. It blended into its forested and mountainous surroundings perfectly. It was hard to picture what it would look like in the summer though, with the snow blotting out most of the features around it.

The interior was warm and welcoming with great crackling fireplaces ensuring that the temperature inside was high enough so as to require one to quickly remove the heavy outer-garments they had been wearing in the cold outside.

They spent the rest of the day relaxing in there, drinking heavily sweetened tea that was laced with a fruit liquor that Soren could not identify and had at first found sickly, but gradually became accustomed to. He sat with Alys and her ladies and several gentlemen who had made the journey with them. Cards and dice seemed to be the pastime of choice. Others had been arriving over the course of the day, all heading there as soon as they had gotten word of a royal hunting party. Favour with the ruling elite was unsurprisingly a prized commodity, and impressing at a hunt was a sure way of gaining it. Banneret of the Grey, Captain Jarod, the Royal Hunt Master, was a prime example of this.

Soren had been introduced to him shortly after arriving. Alys had told him that he was the son of a minor and impoverished lord and had been taken along by his father’s lord to a hunt as a favour. He had displayed great bravery when faced by a wounded and very angry belek, and had won himself a belek cloak, and a post as Master of the Royal Hunt for the remainder of his life. A barony would likely be the reward for his years of loyal service when the time came for him to retire.

He looked far older than his years, with a stern and serious countenance always present on a face that looked as though it had been hewn from the mountains of his birthplace. He was something of an enigma in the court, and set the hearts of many of the ladies fluttering with his commanding and dignified bearing. Many of the stories Soren heard about him came from their gossiping, and Soren had no doubt that they had been heavily embellished. Nonetheless, if they contained even a grain of truth, some of them were very impressive indeed.

His body, it was said, was criss-crossed with the scars left by belek teeth and claws. He was the saviour of many aristocrats, delivering a killing blow with deadly precision an instant before the belek was about to perform a similar deed on a Ruripathian nobleman. It seemed he had made himself into something of a legend in hunting circles, always dependable, stoical and distant. It didn’t particularly impress Soren, but the ladies of court relished it.