Council of Blades (5 page)

Halfway up a neighboring tower, a window shutter hurtled aside. Pealing through the darkness came a voice rich with feminine outrage.

"Miliaaaa-naaaaaa! Miliana, what was that awful noise?"

Scorched black and still suffering a bit from shock, Miliana blinked down into the night.

"It's… it's rats!"

"Rats?" Lady Ulia Mannicci stuck her head through a window and stared up at the girl in outrage. "It sounded like an explosion. How, pray, do rats manage to explode?"

"They've… um… been eating smoke powder!" Miliana noticed a small flame flickering at the tip of her pointy hat; she snatched off the offending headgear and hid it to her rear. "It's all right. I don't mind!"

"I have had quite enough of these fireworks and bangs!" Poised like an impending avalanche on her high balcony, Lady Ulia heaved an indignant breath which threatened to burst her flimsy night attire. "In my day, rats only ate fletching and such. We had none of this dan-gerous and expensive smoke powder-or exploding rodents-laying about back then!"

The shutter closed with a bang, and Miliana had the night sky to herself once more. Fuzzy slippers flopping on her feet, Miliana made her way back into her scorched bedroom and sat down wearily on a chair. Polishing her dusty spectacle lenses, she heaved a sigh, contemplated the results of her latest attempt at an affect normal fires spell, and wondered just exactly how she was going to clean up all the mess before dawn.

One hundred boots slammed against the flagstones in unison, sending a violent echo rippling across the palace walls.

"Company! Stand pikes!"

Locked into open order, the Manniccis' pikemen grounded the butt ends of their weapons, braced the eigh-teen-foot shafts, and rested their free hands against their sword hilts in the accustomed style.

Mounted on a gigantic horse of dark burnt-bronze, Prince Cappa Mannicci watched the maneuver through cold, experienced eyes. The troops looked well; fit after a brisk campaign, and had already been issued new uni-forms financed from the battle spoils. They were now clad in bright pied hose, one side candy-striped and the other side a brilliant green-the very height of fashionable good taste. Mannicci let his sharp gray-shot beard tilt left and right as he surveyed his men, then drew a breath of satis-faction. With a careless wave of his mace, he motioned his fellow Blade Captains forward to inspect the parade.

Fraudulent company rosters were as old as the merce-nary's trade. To assure fellow captains of the value of one another's troops, Sumbria organized inspection parades. Each Blade Captain could settle for themselves any ques-tions of troop strengths, training and equipment by putting their colleagues' units through their paces. Cappa Mannicci stood his horse in the shade of an olive tree and let his peers ride forth to have their fun.

The Mannicci troops formed a tiny army all their own. There were battle mages with their protective squads of apprentices and pavisiers, pikemen, hippogriffs, and cross-bowmen in their droves. Billmen with their wickedly hooked blades, perfectly designed for unhorsing cavalry and deflecting pikes, marched to the fore. Prince Mannicci returned a salute from the golden, prancing lines of his own cavalry, then idly turned to watch his counsellors at play.

Fuming white with rage from some unimaginable wrong, Blade Captain Toporello watched the infantry march by and wrung his reins between his fists like a pair of chicken necks.

Prince Mannicci frowned; for parades, Toporello usual-ly decked his horse out in a harness of star sapphires. The prince blinked at the older man's shabby leather horse trappings, scratched his beard, and decided to let the topic slide.

Passing behind a clean, gleaming squadron of hip-pogriff cuirassiers, Gilberto Ilego swung his mount about to slide in beside the prince. Ilego's horse curvetted pret-tily, allowing the bright morning sun to strike sparks along its copper mane.

"An impressive inspection, sire. Most enlightening."

Ilego had hardly even spared the assembled troops a glance. He matched his horse's pace to that of his prince and posed himself in thought; an artful display designed to convey both elegance and surprise.

Mannicci ignored him, covering his hate by turning his face toward the lines of marching men. Ilego smiled at the slight, taking perverse pleasure in swapping idle talk.

"Sire, I do believe that is your daughter on the bal-cony."

"Like enough." Mannicci scarcely cared enough to con-firm it with a glance. "Her room is just above."

"Aaaaaah." Ilego swiveled snake-bright eyes toward his prince. "A pretty girl, by all accounts."

"I'd like to see whose accounts. I'd like to hire him." Prince Mannicci stirred laggards from his baggage train with a prod of his mace. "He'd be inexpensive to keep; such a man would like his meat very plain."

"But surely, my lord, she has spirit?"

"In a sense," said Mannicci. In truth, he rarely bothered to think about his sole offspring's character.

Spirit in a daughter was considered about as desirable as dorsal guidance feathers on a prize-winning merino ram. "I believe she is a quiet girl-though much troubled by rats."

"Rats, my lord?"

"So I am told."

Prince Mannicci had neither the time nor inclination to bother himself about his daughter. His first spouse had died young; Mannicci's choice of a second wife had done much to line his own coffers, but very little to increase his domestic bliss. He knew he really ought to beget himself a son; unfortunately, Ulia Mannicci was the finest con-traceptive device known to the Blade Kingdoms.

At his side, Gilberto Ilego turned his horse to face the palace balconies.

"You are hard on the girl. There are tales, my lord, of princesses whose beauty launched a thousand ships." Ilego faced his monarch with a bow. "Perhaps your own daugh-ter might aspire to such a thing in her own small way. "A thousand troops, perhaps?"

Prince Mannicci dug his heels down and halted his mighty horse, creasing the corners of his eyes as he let his mind explore the flavor of Ilego's schemes.

A welcome diversion came in the form of a skinny youth dressed in the velvet finery of the royal court.

The young man hovered nearby, wide eyed as a blushing beholder; he kept a leather portfolio clamped tight against his heart, as though he were using it to keep his internal organs from erupting out through his chest.

Prince Mannicci regarded the boy with a heavy frown; eye contact apparently won him a friend for life, and the youth instantly lunged forward and performed some-thing that might possibly be mistaken for a bow.

"My lord! M-my lord prince." The boy almost choked himself on his own tongue as he hopelessly addled a care-fully prepared speech. "Sir-I merely wished to say how… how invigorating your kingdom seems.

How fresh, how inviting, how active!"

Insanity in a man so young seemed such a pitiable thing; Prince Mannicci leaned back in his saddle, cocking an ear toward Ilego, who duly leaned forward to whisper quiet words.

"It is one of the young gentlemen from Lomatra, my lord."

"Oh. Oh, yes." Aha-the prospective groom! Mannicci felt a sudden surge of interest. "Lorenzo Utrelli, I pre-sume?"

The boy took the prince's smile as instant encourage-ment.

"My lord? My lord, I wondered if I might speak with you awhile? That is-I wonder if I can show you.

.."

At this point, the leather portfolio flipped open; cram-ming the wad of papers into the bole of a tree, Lorenzo inserted himself between the two older men and proudly spread out a parchment smothered in designs.

"My lords-I have ideas! Concepts, theories and designs the likes of which the world has never seen.

Designs that will thrill you, my lords. Thrill you to the core!"

Prince Mannicci, ever the diplomat, wearily prepared himself to be bored. In contrast, Blade Captain Ilego stroked his mustache and cast an amused eye across the boy's diagrams.

"Say on, lad. Say on. It cannot be any less entertaining than the parade."

Finding himself with an audience at long last, Lorenzo seated himself in the crutch of an olive tree and used a green twig to point out the salient points of his inventions.

"Look you, sirs. I have been studying basic natural phe-nomena with an eye to making these phenomena work with us-for us." Paper fluttered as the boy avidly flicked through page after page of incomprehensible scrawls. "Ah! For instance… here-do you see? I have been exper-imenting with the forces that make solid objects fall."

A drawing appeared; a drawing showing a very badly rendered stick figure dropping objects from a tower. Lorenzo unleashed his excitement in measured little chunks, marking each point with a sharp wave of his olive twig.

"Now, consider the downward path of a falling object. Let us take two items identical in weight. A pound of feathers, and a pound of lead. Which of them will fall more slowly?"

"A pound of feathers." Mannicci suddenly found that he approved of the boy's logical mind-a reasonably desir-able trait in a potential son-in-law. "What is your point?"

"Aaaah-but why do the feathers fall more slowly? The answer is, simply, air resistance! The feathers present a broad face to the air, thus slowing their descent due to the viscous qualities of the air itself."

Sitting cross-legged in his tree, Lorenzo made his points stab forward one by one.

"So, how is this phenomena useful to us? Well firstly, we have discovered that narrow objects fall more swiftly. I feel this may be useful for making some sort of aerial dart, or what I call a 'bomb.' But, certainly more valuable than that, I believe I can now create a fall-breaking machine! A device made from cloth that will slow the speed of a man's descent through the air, allowing him to alight as safe as if he were a pixie."

This declaration was met by a confused silence from the two armored noblemen. Loath to break the lad's enthusi-asm, Prince Mannicci nevertheless felt it behooved him to give the boy unkind news.

"But my dear-um…"

"Lorenzo, my lord. Lorenzo Utrelli Da Lomatra!"

"Yes, quite…" The boy had the innocent, doelike eyes of a pet fawn unaware that it was being massaged with marinade. Prince Mannicci heaved an unhappy little sigh. "Yet, you must ask yourself, Lorenzo, just why you feel such a device to be useful?"

"Think of it, my lord. We could use my fall-breakers as a safety device… say, for the riders of hippogriffs."

"But our hippogriff riders are already provided with magical protection for such a case." The prince indicated an overflying squadron with a pained wave of his mace. "A one-use ring of feather falling, in point of fact…"

"But at massive cost, my lord! Think of the savings offered by a mechanical device."

The lad's mechanical device seemed to require a huge amount of silk, a fact which rather negated any claims to cheap production. Lorenzo felt his audience's interest waver, and desperately flicked on to other plans.

"Wait, my lord! If the sciences of the air don't interest you, then perhaps the study of heat? Surely a man of your education will be interested in this." Lorenzo turned a gaze so powerful and full of fire upon the older men that they involuntarily fell back. "I have here a design for a drill that uses heat to bore a hole through steel!"

Gilberto Ilego leaned forward with a look of cold con-centration on his face. Lorenzo immediately stumbled onward with his inept sales technique.

"You see, my lords, the combination of these two chem-icals creates an intense blaze of light. This light, I intend to focus using lenses like… like…" The boy's thoughts instantly conjured up an image of a short, freckled girl. "… like the lenses used in eye spectacles! This produces a beam of light-of heat-which can melt even the toughest steel.

"Imagine the benefits to industry, my lords! Handgun production would cheapen; we could use fire beams to drill holes into pure steel bar-stock! Smoke powder weapons would surely come into their own.

We can use the beams to scribe delicate engravings… perhaps even to cut the finest mechanical parts…"

Captain Ilego viewed the drawings with a frown.

"And does this chemical combination reliably work?"

"Um… essentially. Essentially, yes!" The boy cleared his throat. "The problem of explosion is a minor fault at best. Given enough funding, I am sure I can overcome the obstacles."

A logical mind in a potential son-in-law may have been an advantage. An addled mind might be even more so; Prince Mannicci narrowed his eyes, measuring the possibilities.

As Mannicci sank into thought, Ilego flicked a calcu-lating glance between his prince and the Lomatran boy. Blade Captain Ilego handed back the boy's drawings with a cool, predatory smile.

"Since Lorenzo is here with an ambassadorial mission, my lord prince, I'm sure his experiments can be encour-aged for the duration of his stay. We can find him a work-shop, perhaps. A place outside the city walls…"

"No. I believe we shall house him well within our palace. We might have business with him yet…"

"Oh! Oh, thank you, my lord!" Lorenzo flicked a glance toward the palace balcony, drawing in an inspired, dizzy breath as he helplessly searched for words. "I shall not disappoint you."

"Do as you like, boy. But no chemicals, and no jumping off any towers." Not until he had safely married Miliana. "We'd never explain it to your ambassador."

"Oh, thank you, my lord! Thank you!" Lorenzo bobbed up and down like a toy spider on a string.

"M-my grati-tude is… it's…"

Unable to think of proper superlatives, the boy could only open out his hands, finding out too late that Prince Mannicci had taken his chance and ridden fast away. Lorenzo scarcely noticed; looking over the troops, he saw a scrawny figure leaning over a distant balcony; a figure with a bored expression half hidden behind gleaming glass and a towering, pointed hat.

Lorenzo's thoughts were jarred by a cool hand descend-ing upon his arm. Gilberto Ilego looked down at the boy with a reassuring, though somewhat crocodilian smile.

"Five hundred, I think."

"My lord?" Lorenzo's mind wrenched itself from a dizzy flight through a vague and rosy fairy land. "Five hundred?"

"Five hundred gold ducats. It should keep you supplied with experimental equipment during your stay."

Ilego drew a scented handkerchief from his belt and passed it under his nose. "My bursar will honor any notes that you may write."

Stunned, Lorenzo could only stare up at Ilego in utter awe. The Blade Captain turned his horse about and saluted with a wave.