Hand of the King's Evil - Outremer 04 (36 page)

Imber wasn't accustomed to having his character so dissected — except perhaps by his uncle the elder Baron Imber, who held a far less flattering view of it - nor to hearing such plain speech from his merry cousin. Startled and embarrassed, he could say only, 'They didn't all come.'

'Of course not. Some had to stay, to watch the border and to report back on the fanciful and foolish doings of the young Baron-heir.' That was better, the teasing was back in words and voice together. 'Those who chose that course were largely the ones I'd have left in any case. The ones who really do think you're foolish to go chasing off after a woman, unless you intended to see her publicly whipped for the offence she's given to you and your family, which they know you don't. Though I think whoever carries the message to the palace may be surprised by his reception. You're loved there too, and not only by your father. Your uncle will condemn your wilfulness, and his friends will support him, but even he will say that our duty lay in protecting the County's heir-apparent. I tell you, Imber, there's only one man who'll come out of this adventure with his reputation entirely gilded, and that's my own virtuous self. Which is, of course, entirely why I came with you.'

'Of course it is
...'

That had been days ago: days of hard riding in a hard and dry country, with the mountains an impassable wall to bar them from the safety of the Kingdom - riding wrong-handed, Karel called that, and grumbled about the impetuosity of boys who wouldn't take an extra day to put that same wall between themselves and trouble — and the open desert on their left ever a threat. They bypassed all set-dements with caution; the few people that they met at wells or watching flocks were Catari, vassal clans to the Sharai. Those were reluctant - reluctant with reason, Imber thought - even to speak to an armed troop from Elessi, but at least there was no sign of their masters. This was too small a party to risk a quarrel with the Sharai, its mission too urgent to tolerate distractions.

At least the ground was seldom difficult for horses here in this half-world, between the wide sand and the high rock. Often it was easy, hard-packed shale with a smoothing of sand, and there they rode long hours and at speed, resting only once in the heat of the day and again through the deep chill of the night; their big destriers had the stamina to take that pace, and Imber refused to slack it until they must. The only real trouble came to Karel, whose mount found the only pit in miles for its hoof to trip in. Their fall was spectacular. Karel was bruised and shaken, no worse than that; the horses leg had snapped, which was the worst possible news. Imber slit its throat himself, and then insisted on putting Karel up on his own beloved stallion while he rode a spare horse from the string. The commander needs to draw the eye of the men, and this was still Karel's command. His Mutassar was a pure shimmering white, unmistakable, the obvious and only choice; only later did he think that this was another gesture that the men would love in him.

In himself he felt wild, driven. He'd been given the chance to redeem his lady, and that was all his focus. Surely this time she would not run from him. He rode in daylight or in the dark with his eyes fixed always on an unseen goal, a castle he didn't know and circumstances that were impossible to predict. His mind invented a hundred desperate situations, and in each of them he emerged triumphant, with Julianne clinging to his arm. It was only there that his imagination failed. She was an unfathomable mystery to him, and he didn't dare put words into her mouth or feelings into her heart. He barely slept, even when Karel forced a halt and ordered him to his blankets; he had a burning energy that banished weariness. It would prove fickle later, it must fail at last — but not yet, not till Julianne was safe and what lay between them was finally resolved, whichever way that fell. Then he could afford exhaustion, then he might welcome it. Until then, he would use himself and his companions, drain them all and their horses too .
..

Short or long, serene or panicked, every journey has its looked-for end, though that may not be the end of the journey.

Some few of Karel's men had been this way, this far before, on a mission for the Count; there came a night when they promised him Selussin in the morning, and the castle before noon.

Sunlight woke something in him that he thought had been awake and afire already, but had only been smouldering after all.
Today I shall see her, somehow, though all of the men and spirits of the desert defy me.
The thought was like sun-dazzle on bright water, fierce enough to draw tears from his eyes. The slender height of her and the long dark fall of hair, skin soft as rose-petals and coloured like the roses of his mother's treasured garden, all the pure image of a tender girl who had made him love her from the moment of their meeting; and then the gaze that pierced, the tongue that was as sharp as the mind behind it, the joy in him to have found a girl with whom a lifetime of days and nights would never be enough to explore every complicated corner of her
...

More than anything he wanted only to meet Julianne again, to sit and speak with her and learn his future from her lips: whether they could be married in body as they were in law, whether they could ever be married in love. This rime there could be no demands, no question of forcing her to anything. He would ask, as plain and simple as his nature, and trust to her subtlety to see that he could make her happy.

Soon, now. Soon
...

Not soon enough for Imber, but event
ually they did see the tawny outl
ine of mud walls and towers rising to the east of their path, and the cold grey shadow of a castle on a height to the west, seeming to smother even the glare of the sunlight that fell directly upon it. Imber s thoughts had been so fixed on what would happen after, he'd all but forgotten the greater imperative of this journey, the need first to save Julianne from whatever threatened her:
great danger,
the djinni had said. They were half a company, and that
castle
could withstand an army's siege for months if it were garrisoned. For the thousandth time, he wished that the djinni had been explicit about his lady's danger; for the first time, he began to doubt his ability to rescue her.

Even so, he turned his horse towards the rise, and the road he could see climbing up from town to castle. After a minute, Karel drew up level and gestured for him to rein in. He did so reluctantly, and his cousin said, 'We should go into Selussin and speak with the people there, Imber, learn what we can before we approach Revanchard.'

That was right, of course, common sense and good military practice both at once; but he shook his head despite a lifetimes training. 'No. Send a man, send all the troop, go yourself if you want to. I'm going up.'

‘I
mber, your safety is my responsibility.'

'As Julianne's is mine. Karel, I will be careful; I don't intend to ride straight to the castle gates and beat on them with my sword-hilt. But we've been a full week on the march; we may be too late already, and I won't waste another half a day in seeking out some braggart who claims to know more than eyes and wits can show me. Julianne is my wife and needs my help; it may be wisdom or stupidity, but I will go.'

Karel gazed at him levelly, thoughtfully for a moment. 'What would be wisdom,' he said, 'for an ambitious captain and a cousin to the Count, would be to knock you from the saddle and have my men bind you until I was certain how the land lay, before us and behind. However,' grinning suddenly, T too have been in love, and mad with it. Besides, life has been too dull lately, and over
-
caution has lost as many battles as foolhardiness. Very well, my lord Baron-heir, I am with you - but cautiously. I'll send two Catari-speakers into the town, to learn whatever they can; the rest of us go up together. And you ride in the centre of the troop, and if we find an ambush waiting, then the men around you take you down again, whether you will or no. I do not want to be the one who confesses to the Count — or to your lady mother the Countess, which would be worse — that I have lost their infant son and the hope of all the County.'

A well-laid ambush would deny them any retreat, willing or forced, but Karel knew that as well as he did. He disregarded the teasing and nodded his acceptance of terms that he certainly couldn't change. Karel made his dispositions swiftly; two men peeled away while the rest reformed and began a more steady advance, scouts ahead and a rearguard behind and Imber safely nested at the heart of all. He resented both the pace and the protection, he yearned to be racing on like a hero from a ballad, leaving all his companions in his wake - but heroes from ballads often expired in their ladies' arms, mortally wounded in the course of their bold rescues. He would be
little
use to Julianne with an arrow in his throat, dying without ever knowing whether or not she could have loved him.

They skirted fields and reed-beds, and made better speed once they reached the road; Karel trusted his scouts, and was not seriously expecting an ambush in any case. Imber knew his cousin. This would have been good country for it, steep rock walls crowding their way - but whoever they faced at the
castle
called Revanchard could not have been expecting them, and would have had no time to lay a trap. Nor, Imber was sure, would the djinni have sent them into one without a warning.

He wasn't sure whether Karel would trust to the same uncertain oracle, but Karel trusted himself and his own judgement, in a way that Imber thought he never would.
The God preserve that man, for when I must be Count—
which was the first time he had thought that or anything like it, and he couldn't decide if this was a strange or a likely time to be having such a thought, nor how comfortable he was to find himself thinking it.

But it was there in his head and it seemed to make sense, to fit a pattern. There was Imber, Count Imber; and there was Karel, holding whatever title he might choose that Imber was free to give him so long as he held his place at Imber's right hand, as — thinking back—he always had done, as Imbers uncle had stood always at his fathers side; and there on Imbers left, holding his left hand literally was Julianne, Countess Julianne, and it was all so clear and right that it felt like a sending.

The God grant that it was no false vision. Imber felt that he was looking at Karel with new eyes suddenly, measuring him against men a generation older, and finding him in no sense wanting. He almost opened his mouth to speak, to say something of what he saw; but just at that moment the road turned around a jut of rock and ran out onto a plateau, and there was the
castle
in all its grim menace, direcdy ahead of them.

There were the castle gates, and they stood wide open; and all around were the ashes of many fires, and there was movement both within the gates and on the plateau, and none of it was at all what Imber had expected even in his wildest imaginings.

They were peasants, or so they seemed by both dress and manner, who were so busy here: Catari and his own people mixed, so they couldn't all have come from the town below. They were men largely, with a few young women among them; and they were all in grief, silent and distressed, a grief that was greater than seemed justified even by the work that they were at.

There must have been a battle here, or a slaughter rather. The people were carrying bodies out from the
castle
, a terrible number of bodies that they laid out in line on the ground; from his saddles height Imber could see old men and women among the dead, and children too. Most seemed to have no mark of death upon them; so perhaps it was not a slaughter after all, perhaps it was poison or sickness that had carried them off. After a moment, it didn't seem to matter. He scanned the line feverishly, and didn't see her face; he turned his eyes to the gates and spurred forward, crying, 'Julianne
...!'

'Imber, wait! Come back—'

There was, there could be no going back. He rode into the
castle
forecourt and found more corpses, in a jumbled pile. The people there fell back and gazed up at him mutely, accusingly,
you came too late.

That he knew already. One hasty glance assured him that Julianne did not lie among the bodies here, but there was small comfort in that. The djinni had said that she was here, and he had all the castle yet to search.
In great danger,
the djinni had said, and he had been too slow, too careful on the road. . .

He was neither slow nor careful now. He flung himself from his horse, heedless of the sound of hooves behind him and Karel's voice yelling; he raced madly in through the nearest open doorway yelling himself now, crying Julianne's name and hearing nothing but echoes returned to him.

He ran through darkness and through sudden beams of light, as though his own despair and occasional flickers of hope —
not here, not yet, I have not
found her yet so perhaps she is not here-
had been turned physical in the air around him by the strength and depth of his emotion. He plunged up stairs and down, turning corners where they came and taking passages at random, never stopping for thought or balance, so that he was swiftly lost within the
castle
's defensive maze. He stumbled over risen flags and fallen corbels, once he fell sprawling over an unexpected step; but he touched nothing but stone and old wood, he discovered no one living and no one dead, his hoarsening voice raised no answer but the dust.